.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is all over the place right now. The first twenty two films maintained a constant and mostly consistent narrative, bringing in and then tying up various characters and story threads that culminated satisfactorily in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. It was an incredible experiment in the medium of blockbuster cinema and it paid off magnificently (and commercially). Since then though the movies have varied widely in tone with disparate elements that have too often gone nowhere, as different creative forces throw ideas around at random each hoping their vision will be the one to stick, all heavily confused and compounded by the Disney+ TV shows. Prior to 2019 Marvel did what no studio had done before, bringing all of their work together in one remarkable mainstream entertainment project, but since then they have just done what every studio does; just making a bunch of movies and stuff.

What is great about Thunderbolts* is that they take this state of things; the feeling that no one really knows what is going on and that everyone is either making it up as they go along or desperately trying to take charge, and they make it a feature of the story. I don’t for a second think this has been their plan all along but now it turns out that the disarray is actually the connective thread. 

Thunderbolts* then brings together a group of minor players from the MCU, big screen and small, and sets them off on a scrappy mission. Those involved; Yelena, Ghost, Red Guardian, US Agent, Taskmaster, Valentine de Fontaine and Bucky, are all bad guys or antiheroes and they are pitched against a rogue superhero with a dangerous god complex. This picks up on ideas explored elsewhere but this is simultaneously both more and less than a redo of Suicide Squad or Homelander. On the surface it is not as much fun as these other properties but it actually isn’t worried about the surface, aiming instead to go deeper. 

I have to say that Thunderbolts* is not what I expected. Even aside of how it manages to make the MCU a metaphor for itself, it has its sights on very different types of monsters to those normally found in these types of movies. The real villain here turns out to be depression which is clearly something you don’t have to be in a superhero film to come up against and like Black Panther: Wakanda Forever with its focus on grief and mourning this makes it more relatable than a lot of Summer blockbusters. On the one hand the depiction of how this illness can destroy everything is powerful, the idea of being stuck in self hatred and painful regret being boldly manifested on screen in a metaphysical battleground. As a whole I applaud this although it is perhaps too on the nose to show someone punching their personal demons in the face as they do at one point here. There is also a risk that mental health is being demonised a little but I think this is saved by having the main protagonist dealing with similar issues to the antagonist and having them work toward a denouement together. It is also good that the victory is not decisive, everything is not all okay by the end. Winning is an ongoing effort.

There are other aspects that Thunderbolts* handles well. It continues a theme that has been running through the MCU since its first movie and with characters like Iron Monger, Abomination, Ultron, Adam Warlock, Killmonger, Yellowjacket and US Agent, that trying to create heroes or giving the wrong person the suit does not go well. It nicely mocks how corny said suits often are on the pages of the comic books too. It deftly manages something that has plagued some of the non-avengers movies as well, particularly films like Thor: The Dark World and Spider-Man: Far From Home, that when there are world threatening events why do none of the other heroes come to help (maybe they just don’t care about London). This one is set in Manhattan, where Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, Daredevil and the new Hawkeye all live. It is feasible in this case that they’d have been caught off guard and incapacitated though; everything does happen very quickly. It poses other questions about what was happening to them but it doesn’t raise the question of why they stayed away. 

The asterisk that features in the title and the publicity is dealt with decisively too, as is the reason why Olga Kurylenko who plays Taskmaster does not really turn up in those promos. The de rigueur post credit sequence is satisfying as well, cementing the smart parallels between the shambolic nature of the MCU on and off screen and giving us a nice, if obvious, nod to what’s coming. Oh and my favourite song from an 80s film is now from this movie too. 

In the end Thunderbolts* is probably more than the sum of its parts but that is something that has always been true of the MCU, so that also fits.

.

The Ripley Factor:

I’ve brought back my now occasional feature where I look at the representation of women in cinema because there is something of note here too. By bringing together a group of characters from different films and putting them together in a team, the comparisons here to the first Avengers movie are obvious, totally deliberate and nicely explored. That film was a much cited recent example of the smurfette principle where a single female is placed tokenistically in a group of men. Good then that this group has more than one woman, is effectively put together by a woman and ostensibly lead by a woman.

.

Post script: Now that a few days have passed it has emerged that Marvel had other plans in respect of that asterisk, and it’s kind of genius. So it is established in the film that the name Thunderbolts is just a place holder for the group in the story but now they are proceeding as if it was also thus for the movie itself. This only strengthens the idea that events on screen and off are comparable and I love the whole meta not meta way they are going about it. So, spoilers, if you go on the film’s website it is now, like them called The New Avengers. There are videos online of the cast changing the posters and they have pasted over the hoardings in LA. If you look up The New Avengers on IMDb it takes you to this movie. The cinemas do not appear to have changed their listings but maybe that happens when they publish next week’s schedule.

Films have changed their names before, 1985’s Vision Quest became Crazy For You when the Madonna song in it turned out to be much bigger than movie. Birds of Prey and The Fantabulous Emancipation on One Harley Quinn dropped those last eight words while it was still in theatres. The main title became the subtitle when The Edge of Tomorrow was released on disc as Live, Die, Repeat: The Edge of Tomorrow.

All of those were after thoughts though, this has clearly been part of the publicity and I love it. I’m changing the title of this review.