'Thunderbolts*', You're Great, But Let Me Help You

* = The second or third best version of this movie.

Full disclosure, I was not expecting to see Thunderbolts* in cinemas. My new living/employment situation simply doesn’t allow me¹ the moviegoing life I once enjoyed, and with what I saw as more lucrative splurge occasions like Sinners, The Phoenician Scheme, and The Life of Chuck in the mix, I was content to sit this one out.

But then I found out that my mom — who loves Julia Louis-Dreyfus — wanted to go see it, so I performed a series of unspeakably shameful acts² in order to acquire a pair of Mother’s Day tickets, and off we went.

Now, folks, ever since I started shoving coal into the firebox of the new film criticism train, I’ve very rarely used it in a way that’s constructive to the film itself — I often find myself communicating what a film does, rather than what it probably should have done with respect to what it’s already doing. This, mostly because any constructive points I would be able to make on the films I tend to write about would be far too exacting to warrant a mention.

It’s to the point where, if I did, I’d probably be saying so little of actual value compared to what I could say about what the film is doing, that the constructive points wouldn’t even really be constructive anymore, or at least be less constructive than the latter.

Besides, imperfection is a virtue; it speaks to the state of constant evolution that human beings — and the art that they make and interpret — are in.

That’s going to change here, because while Thunderbolts* understands the superhero genre in a way that Marvel hasn’t really seemed to since 2022³, it still makes a few noticeable mistakes — big enough to take up space in this piece of criticism in a way that’s genuinely constructive. And honestly? I’m gassed to see it make these mistakes, because they’re now the exception instead of the broad expectation.

But to understand the mistakes as mistakes, they must be contextualized in what Thunderbolts* is and does.

In my Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny piece, I talked about how pop culture cinema is most aptly rendered with a visual language that understands the cultural superiority of the material over the artists that are adapting it. Marvel mostly, if accidentally, follows this philosophy, but the problem with so many of their recent movies (particularly Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Marvels, Captain America: Brave New World, and — to an extent — Deadpool & Wolverine) is an apparent preoccupation with trying to sell us on the material that they’re adapting here.

Indeed, pay attention to the obviously last-minute closer for The Marvels, the plotline pileup in Brave New World, or pretty much anything in Quantumania — there’s a concerted effort in each film to contrive massive, spectacle-driven obstacles and intricate lore, which are then centred at the partial or total expense of the characters.

It’s as if Marvel’s mandate for each film is to lay out informational bullet points on the back of the packaging for a product before offering up a live demonstration.

This, as if the studio doesn’t believe in the superhero genre enough to trust that we don’t need to be sold on it.

Thunderbolts* does not do this. If it did, a talking labcoat would pontificate on the science behind the Void’s shadow dimension, and there would be chatter about how crazy it is that the politics of this world involve superhero management.

Instead, it focuses on the human element of these specific characters, whose baked-in congruency with this genre sheen allows it to exist very naturally — the characters don’t treat the world around them as an oddity or a spectacle, and therefore the camera doesn’t. That’s textbook pop culture deference.

Thunderbolts* is interested in the superhero-specific politics of this world, and also allows this world to be weird, but it isn’t naively preoccupied with these things like its contemporaries are. It understands the comic book set dressing as exactly that — set dressing — and allows it to prop up the characters.

Yelena’s mention of a “forward-facing” opportunity would be an example of the politics, while the navigation of the Void’s trauma dimension would be an example of the world being weird.

Focusing on the human element of these characters, of course, is is a boon that pays its own dividends.

Thunderbolts* is a story about the indiscriminate nature of pain, depression, and loneliness, and the very simple fact that we all need each other. Is it the deepest, most profound, most erudite examination of these things ever put to screen? No, of course not, and Thunderbolts* would be foolish to try to be.

Luckily, it doesn’t. Instead, it identifies an incredibly unique angle on these ideas that only it could satisfy.⁴ Namely, it puts the themes in constant conversation with the superhero genre and everything that it stands for.

At this stage of humanity, great storytelling isn’t about penetrating the existing depths of an idea — it’s about exploring the possible widths of them, and if you discover an angle that hasn’t been excavated, you’re literally breaking ground in the conversation.

This mission statement is telegraphed from the film’s opening moments. Yelena — lonely, stuck in a cycle, and still markedly scarred by the death of her sister — gives us a voiceover about how utterly down in the dumps she is. As she’s complaining about the specific monotony of her job, we see her taking down a bunch of guards at the lab she was sent to blow up — cold, hard, high-action spy combat to cold-open this latest superhero story.

In this very early scene, Thunderbolts* is acknowledging something we’ve been begging the MCU to clue in to for some time — the glitzy combat is nothing more than frosting for the superhero. The flashy-but-empty-calorie decoration. It’s not why we audiences love and are inspired by them, and it’s not why in-universe citizens are, either.

No, we love superheroes because they’re there for us. They save lives and centre the humans caught in these bombastic crossfires — that’s the cake of the superhero. The purpose. Their “job” was never the combat that Yelena feels existentially trapped by and that Marvel pushes as a stylish-but-soulless selling point (and yes, those two things are connected) — the job and purpose of the superhero has always stemmed from a prioritization of the human communities they exist in.

Indeed, we’re excited by a punch, but we’re moved when Red Guardian charges across the street to save a little girl from a piece of falling debris, and then gutted when that little girl is helplessly zapped to the Void’s shadow dimension moments later.

This is partly why I love the relatively monochromatic colour scheme here. Thunderbolts* avoids the decoration of visual frosting so that we’re more rawly acquainted with the cake of these superheroes. Then, when we meet a glammed-up, newly-suited Sentry for the first time, we can more quickly recognize that blue-and-gold sheen as the vapid decoration that it is. He’s not there on the ground with other human beings, saving the day; he’s just a shiny decoration that’s being fickly valued and ogled for his power.⁵

Is it any wonder that Bob — the human being behind Sentry that’s gone for some time without love and community — becomes momentarily obsessed with power and the resulting attention? Sure, it could only ever give him the vapid imitation of love and community, but at least he finally feels he has something.

Then there’s Alexei, who I consider the most important cog in this cinematic conversation that Thunderbolts* is having with the superhero genre. This man is undiluted crimson cringe — except, it only feels like cringe because he’s so enthusiastically sincere about superherodom and being a team (community). Sincerity, of course, being the long-missing ingredient in Marvel’s recent efforts, and one we therefore may have grown unfamiliar with (hence the cringe).

Thunderbolts*, of course, rectifies this by taking a genuine interest in the emotions of these characters while smartly committing to the human-first foundation of the superhero’s purpose. It’s fostering an intimacy with the superhero genre — an intimacy we may have once ironically face-palmed at, as Yelena face-palms Alexei and as Marvel face-palms itself, but one that we’ll facepalm less and less as we open ourselves up to it (now that Thunderbolts* has properly given us something to open up to).

Similarly, Alexei drives the portion of Yelena’s arc that urges us to not cringe at sincerity or default to irony. Early on in the film, Yelena’s go-to demeanour is sarcastic and blasé. By the later stages, she allows the mask to fall in favour of opening up emotionally. And who does she open up to? Alexei, who has embodied unabashed sincerity from the jump.

John Walker is also characterized brilliantly here. He very much behaves as an exhausting, oblivious, mansplaining type, and when coupled with the fact that he has a wife and child, we might find ourselves inclined to write off his capacity for pain, as we so often do with privileged people.

But then Bucky reveals that John has no family waiting for him, his wife having left him with supposed full custody of the kid. Yelena’s gaze upon hearing this is perfect — full of deep and sincere recognition that John is in a lot of pain, too; the very same indiscriminate pain that must necessarily be rectified with community. This, after Yelena had previously written off Walker’s suffering and primarily met him with sarcasm.

Straight cis white guys have social prevalence and privilege. That is not the same as love and community, and that cannot be stressed enough. Thunderbolts* understands this.

And speaking of Bucky (who hangs up his congressman hat so as to re-enter the field as the Winter Soldier), he steps up here as a key component of Thunderbolts*’ conversation with the superhero genre, trading in the impression of action in Congress so that he’s freed up to actually take action in the streets of New York.

For Bucky (having gone from perceived walking weapon to now-legacy superhero in his own right), the relative inaction of congress has only reaffirmed in him, as a character, one of Thunderbolts*’ core philosophies:

When it comes to being a superhero (or, more aptly, a difference-maker), it’s not about what you can do, it’s about what you do do, even if you think you can only punch and shoot. Indeed, you can also rescue, and you can love.

Moreover, superheroes deserve to be fulfilled by their actual purpose (saving people) rather than spiritually waste away in the throes of embellished combat (or, in Bucky’s case, politics; a network that unofficially serves the status quo of the system).

In terms of action and progress, you have the official-looking, digestible frosting of congress (similar to the oft-excessive comic book set pieces and lore that anxiously reassure us that we are watching a comic book movie)…

…and the cake of actually getting shit done (similar to the oft-neglected human elements that are conducive to a comic book movie that’s actually good).

Bucky is a cake person.

With all of that said, it’s time for those mistakes I promised.

NOTE: Hours away from posting this when I told myself I would, and I’ve started to see how Mel’s arc makes sense here. But, rather than rewrite what I’ve already written below, I’m going to play both sides of the fence with a retroactive Notes post (especially since a lot of what I’ve written would improve Mel’s function as a character either way).

UPDATE 05/18: The Note is live! Give it a read once you’re done here.

First, I question the decision to make Mel’s (Geraldine Viswanathan) rescuing of Valentina from Sentry the last time we see her in this film. The thread of Mel’s character is that of a young, inexperienced soul that can only identify a difference-making opportunity when it involves proximity to established systems and power.

Thunderbolts*, of course, makes an example of rejecting this narrow way of thinking by guiding Mel on a path to breaking free beyond it. Mel experiences smatterings of disillusionment as the film goes on, jeopardizing her proximity to this system by becoming a spontaneous informant to Bucky.

Why not, then, have this arc culminate in Mel — who watched the Avengers save New Yorkers and the city around them when she was still a child — finding herself on the ground during the Void’s attack, ushering panicking civilians to safety?

Maybe have an extra scene where she wakes up from a nightmare wherein she relives the Chitauri attack on New York and runs/hides/cries/whatever, and then recreate that destructive set piece when the Void attacks, except this time, she stands and protects.

This way, Mel’s fear (which we can link to her initial submission to non-human systems, which most people have a tendency to do), and her conquering of it, would have contributed to Thunderbolts*’ thesis on overcoming demons and centering community for the good of oneself and others.

In the cut of Thunderbolts* that we saw, Mel seems to be on this path, but then she just disappears after saving Valentina. It’s true that Mel — by nature of this shared universe she inhabits — can show up in other stories, but Mel’s thematic trajectory suited Thunderbolts* immaculately, so why risk re-introducing this arc in a film that it probably won’t be congruent with thematically?

Sure, Marvel will probably just treat her as a plot device from here on out, but it remains that a large chunk of Mel’s value as a character went unextracted by Thunderbolts* for no apparent reason. By extension, that means a chunk of Thunderbolts*’ value went unextracted for no apparent reason.

Moving on, I’ve already foreshadowed what I consider to be the bigger mistake that Thunderbolts* makes, and it’s one that I really want to be pushed back on.

That is to say, I can push back on myself with Mel, but I can offer no justification for the killing of Taskmaster.

Disclaimer: I have no attachment to this character. I think Taskmaster’s superpowers are dope as hell, but that’s it. I am emotionally uninvolved with her death.

But consider her death through the lens what Thunderbolts* is — not just its more grounded thematic interests, but the way those interests are filtered through the lens of the superhero genre, and, more specifically, the MCU as a canon and cultural organism.

Think about it; this is a character who was mocked relentlessly by the Marvel fandom, whether it was an unimaginative bandwagon onto her paltry Black Widow screentime or more droning about gender-swapping. This was not a character that had much in the way of love, in a movie full of characters who do not have much in the way of love.

Moreover, Taskmaster not only had one of the more severe in-universe hands dealt to her (her dad, Dreykov, basically enslaved her and built her into the perfect assassin), but she had a comparatively fruitless reprieve from it, too. So, in the aggregate (meaning in-universe and real-life), Taskmaster was arguably harbouring the harshest pain and loneliness of all, in a film that championed the importance of community in overcoming that.

And she’s unceremoniously shot in the head at the beginning of the film.

Unknowingly or not, what message does that send in the context of a film like Thunderbolts*? That some people are beyond saving? That sometimes someone’s pain is too deep? These questions are fair game, but they’re addressed with cynicism, rather than the humanism that Thunderbolts* overtly values.⁶

AVA: You knew her?

YELENA: Yeah. She had a tough life. She killed a lot of people, and then she got killed, just like us someday.

This entire beat of Taskmaster’s death is functionally inconsistent with the rest of Thunderbolts*; by killing Taskmaster, no relevant value is truly gained, and the film’s thematic heft is compromised (albeit far from totally).⁷

And on top of that, I would even go so far as to say that keeping Taskmaster alive would have enhanced the film beyond the patching of that aforementioned hole.

Taskmaster wouldn’t need a proper arc here, and would in fact work best without one — she is, as I established earlier, steeper in the traumatic weeds than the others, and so a relatively static presence would call attention to how we need to be given what we need to survive before we can be expected to thrive.

But still, she would need something to do; a space to occupy. Why not pair her up with Ghost, who was hardly given anything to well and truly do in this movie?

This pairing would do a few things in service to Thunderbolts*. First, it would emphasize Ghost’s reckoning with her own trauma by way of giving her steady interaction with one person, rather than the group dynamics that serve as her only consistent form of connection here.

That one-on-one interaction taps into a certain intimacy that group dynamics can’t (best exemplified by Yelena’s late-stage trauma-dump to Alexei), and it would allow Ghost to have more observable, intimate friction with her trauma than she was given in the cut of this film that we got.

She wouldn’t even need much dialogue in reference to her past, as our assumed familiarity with this character means it would be enough to just have her interact with somebody — to have somebody consistently acknowledge her, specifically.

That thematic significance can afford to be entirely supplementary to the overall narrative, which has more than enough juice in the cut of Thunderbolts* that we got.

More importantly, consider that Ghost was sent to kill Taskmaster — who, again, had one of, if not the worst hand dealt to her, certainly relative to Ghost, who found some limited form of reconciliation during Ant-Man and the Wasp — at the O.X.E. facility.

These two things — Ghost being much further along on her healing journey, and Ghost being the one who was supposed to kill Taskmaster — create a precedence of power that Ghost would have had over Taskmaster, had Taskmaster not been killed off.

And so, if Ghost and Taskmaster became defined by their friendship — one that could afford to be recognized rather than explored — in this movie, you would suddenly create this sturdy, poignant, uncumbersome thread of redemption that gels flawlessly with Thunderbolts* thematic essence:

If Ghost is capable of reaching out a loving hand to the very same person that that hand was once going to reflexively and mercilessly kill — a rejection of that precedence of power in favour of fostering community — what does that say about our capacity for change?

About what we can recover from, individually and collectively, when we prioritize community?

About what human beings — many of whom can’t even punch or shoot — can build together and protect each other from?

In conclusion, justice for Taskmaster is justice for Thunderbolts*.

Now, again, while I’m something of a hardass about these mistakes, I am nevertheless delighted that these are the kinds of mistakes that Marvel is making here. That recognizable imperfection — that contrast between the mistake and a film that well and truly has an identity made up of ideas and values and interests — is thousands of steps up from the meek, frictionless Kevin Feige Venmo codes of late.

Anyhow, I sincerely hope that this franchise is able to keep going, so long as future releases manage to keep pace with Thunderbolts*. I say that because the MCU, arguably more than any other franchise, has historically been an effective cinema gateway drug.

Indeed, I would bet a hefty sum that a fair chunk of film enthusiasts found their way to the Lanthimoses and PTAs of the world because of what Infinity War did to their brains and pre-conceived notions about what a movie could be and do. I wince at all the “Was Thanos right?” peddling, but at the end of the day, Infinity War genuinely, filmically exercised brains that were used to forgetting — and were perhaps, on that day, expecting to forget — about a film the day after they went to go see it.

Suddenly, the Infinity Saga had casual, mainstream filmgoers paying retroactive attention to the nuances of multi-film character arcs, culminating in a plethora of surprisingly meditative knot-ties courtesy of Endgame. Iron Man and Captain America today, Jake LaMotta and Lydia Tár tomorrow.

These films — built on the back of some of the most enduring characters in the history of pop culture — really, truly, accomplished something special by planting the seeds that they did, and they accomplished that because enough of these films had a foundation of honest, creative love. Is it not poetry in motion, then, that Marvel’s artistic resurgence has occurred in Thunderbolts*, whose characters are narratively driven by this need for a very similar love?

Anyhow, I’ll be rooting for The Fantastic Four: First Steps to also hit a fly ball. Who knows? Maybe Marvel will be able to tighten it down to just one mistake.⁸

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1. To be more specific, I don’t drive, and the nearest cinema is an hour away by car since I moved back into my childhood home (a week after which I got shitcanned from my old job, as many of you know), so frequent cinema trips would be a logistical and financial nightmare. It hurts my soul, but it’s just the situation I’m in while I build towards the next stage of my life, whatever that looks like.

2. Willingly paid online booking fees that the cinema chain in question received a lawsuit over.

3. I don’t really count Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3; James Gunn was more or less doing his own thing there.

4. Golden rule: It’s never about telling the best story; it’s about telling your story.

5. I can’t really talk about Sentry without bloating this post too much, so I’ll save him for a possible Thunderbolts* revisit once it hits Disney Plus.

6. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’s handling of Prowler is a great example of the sort of thing that Thunderbolts* should have done if they insisted on killing Taskmaster.

7. Jake Schreier, the director (who did a fantastic job), talks about the reasoning behind killing Taskmaster here. His points (insofar as they were his instead of the studio’s) are weak, and I plan on discussing them, but I’ll save that for a Notes post.

8. It’s Joseph Quinn.