It turned out...that this thing is actually pretty good. One of the better Marvel movies...period. It is remarkably tight, balances a bunch of characters old and new, and has some legit enthralling action. Spoilers who cares, let's dive in.
I don't really know how this came about, we do have a lot of cast offs from various properties hanging around at this point. It's the tough thing, as a medium, comics are so disposable, you can have a one-off with the Leader or Yelena Belova and leave it at that. Lining up film production is such a bigger deal.
This movie feels like a melding of Black Widow and Captain America worlds, and those are pretty melded from Winter Soldier (2014). You've got Yelena, Red Guardian, and Taskmaster from Black Widow (2019) mixing it up with US Agent and Bucky from Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Throw in Ghost from Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) and we're all happy.
Oh, and Sentry of course. I was impressed with how accurate and organic they presented Sentry's origin and Lewis Pullman deftly played in between dope, God, and Devil. I read a lot of Dark Avengers and Siege storylines back in the day. This team definitely slides more akin to Dark Avengers with Julia Louis-Dreyfuss pretty much taking the Norman Osborn role, but it all works.
Let's get the rest out of the way. Taskmaster, already perhaps the most altered and wasted MCU character gets Slipknot'd here pretty much immediately. It's a bizarre game of poster and trailer editing from here. I get it. The character doesn't have too much to do, everyone hates her, why not just kill her quick.
Bucky is also weird. He brings a weariness here as the closest anyone on this team is to a real avenger but he's not the leader, definitely shouldn't be a senator, and is pretty far from the unstoppable badass he was 11 years ago. Just kind of a puppy now.
Red Guardian is David Harbour going nuts, I mean, this is the man who brought us Victor Frankenstein's Frankenstein after all. He largely hits the mark and the laughs aren't so much the "That just happened!" bullshit from Marvel, Star Wars, and SNL lately.
I do like how him, John Walker, and Taskmaster all have shields and basically everyone except Yelena have some variety of Super Soldier serum.
Ghost is...here. She's a super useful team member and the only one with real out there super powers. It'd be nice if she had any real character lifting work to do but we can't have room for everyone.
Wyatt Russell plays a really great asshole and there is enough depth here to make a somewhat well rounded character.
But the star is really Florence Pugh, who is not only effortlessly embodying this character, but somehow proving her late stage MCU value, being a WAY more interesting Black Widow than Scar Jo ever was, and being a really true Eastern European. I feel like I know girls like her, how she talks, how she reacts, is all spot on.
This film is all about trauma, and that's kind if something the MCU has needed for like six years. There us A LOT of collective trauma in this Universe that everyone ignores or plays with sarcastic disdain like Thor: Love and Thunder (2022). It took a really great screenwriter to realize this was the common bond between all these wretches, and then pull it off.
This is most centered around the Void, who is really just an unstoppable nightmare. I remember in Siege, Loki had to employ the Nurn stones just so all the heroes could fight it together and then Thor struck it with the biggest lightning bolt of all time. We really needed to see Sentry ripping Ares in half tho.
There's no way to fight this thing, the only way us to heal. While Brave New World (2025) did this with the elegance of performing surgery with a piece of wet fish, Thunderbolts* does the work and it pays off. Plus they kill a little kid! That might be the boldest move ever in the MCU.
This thing is shot pretty well, I actually struggle to remember a Marvel movie that made NYC look so big and authentic. You always got to remember that Whedon shot the Avengers like a TV show with the flatest lighting imaginable. There is good contrast here, even if it is filled with quite a bit of grays and browns, as is typical.
There is also a nice progression of moments and beats, it focuses in character, and as mostly street level blokes, it has a lot of grounded action instead of big weightless CGI. Basically everything is good and it's astounding.
I couldn't give less than a crap about the Fantastic Four (2025), no matter what the reviews will say. I'm also sincerely doubtful about Doomsday (2026), it seems way too desperate. But I do find myself for the first time in a long time really interested in seeing more of these characters and not the same old played out actors.
Where do they go from here, though? I'm not talking about that excessive Doomsday cast list. Who is still in play? I don't think Doc Strange has used up his welcome. Nor Spider-Man but they gotta figure out what to do with him. I'd like to see more Namor but I think that actor got in trouble? And man, where the hell is the most charismatic dude they got right now, Simu Liu?!
But the iced Wanda, iced Vision, I don't think the Shuri Black Panther works, no one's clamoring for Iron Heart, Kate Bishop maybe, and the Marvels, despite me being a big Teyona Parris fan, were such a dud they might just can the MCU's most powerful character.
Michael Shannon for Beta Ray Bill!
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