Thunderbolts* hits the ceiling of low expectations for Marvel movies

In the landscape of superhero films, movies that are “good enough” are often slathered with unearned superlatives. Particularly in the past five years, as the overall quality of movies produced by Marvel has deteriorated, anything that isn’t rock-bottom terrible gets treated as the Second Coming. Thunderbolts* fits into this category. It’s far more polished and entertaining than most recent entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It doesn’t have a cheap veneer or messy editing that indicates constant fiddling. It meets the bare minimum of its requirements, but is being treated as something more. Thunderbolts* should be the bar, but unfortunately, right now, it looks like the ceiling.

Ad campaigns have already let the cat out of the bag: the rag-tag team of outsiders known as the Thunderbolts are the New Avengers. The film follows Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), a contractor hired to destroy an experimental laboratory working on creating a “superhuman” in order to protect the interests of the new CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis Dreyfus). This small action creates a snowball effect that draws her into a self-destructive trap, linking Yelena with a team of other social outcasts, including Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Red Guardian (David Harbour), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) and John Walker (Wyatt Russell). Though they’re used to working solo, they have to work together to save themselves, and possibly the world.

Thunderbolts* works in a similar way as Guardians of the Galaxy: the characters are fun, unpredictable anti-heroes. David Harbour and Wyatt Russell especially bring a dark comic touch to the film that is self-effacing and unpredictable. In a cinematic landscape that often feels overscripted and overworked, there’s a spontaneity and looseness to the performances here that are genuinely pleasurable. This is also due to the fact that, unlike some of the more embarrassing moments in Marvel’s recent history, actors are clearly performing in the same scene — they’re not pasted together in post-production. It also helps that the movie has a nuanced and present villain, played with reliable snark by Julia Louis Dreyfus. Characters lead in this film, which makes it an overall enjoyable experience.

As the film focuses on Yelena, a Russian character, the movie integrates references to Soviet cinema — in particular the works of Andrei Tarkovsky. With overt allusions to Solaris and Stalker, the film does have, in fleeting moments, an “original” aesthetic identity. The integration of these references, however, serve to underline a spiritual and artistic poverty of these mega-blockbusters more than they actually enrich them. The fragile threads that hold together the invocations of Tarkovsky end up feeling more craven than inspirational. When we’re dealing with Marvel filmmaking, we’re ultimately dealing with a corporate product at best, and military propaganda at worst: to be clear, we’re not dealing with art. It cheapens the work of artists like Tarkovsky by shoehorning them into a film like this one, reducing their vision to something that can be copy-pasted into a soulless American product.

Even though Thunderbolts* might be “good enough” it still falls into Marvel’s many pitfalls. Under the enormous weight of the franchise’s lore, there are constant references and callbacks to previous films, mostly to keep the viewer up to date in case they haven’t seen (or don’t remember) all the movies. The exposition is handled decently, but it’s becoming tiring having to be constantly reminded of essential context from films or TV series that were not especially good, or that you might not have watched at all. Do the diehard fans who manage to watch every single Marvel product ever get tired of constantly being talked down to or having things that happened three years ago explained? It’s emblematic of the serialized tone of these films, but it also showcases why the serial format has always worked better for TV than for cinema. A “previously on…” is far more effective than a constant drone of explainers.

Is Thunderbolts* worth seeing? If you don’t hate Marvel movies, sure. It’s likely the best film in the franchise since Guardians of the Galaxy 3, ranking among the better MCU films made in the past decade. And yet it also suffers from many of the problems that these films share — not just the constant exposition, but uneven momentum, some weak fight sequences and the fact that it ultimately leaves you with nothing to grasp onto intellectually, artistically or spiritually. ■

Thunderbolts* (directed by Jake Schreier)

Thunderbolts* is now playing in Montreal theatres.

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