What The Hell America!

Florence Pugh is so terrific in Thunderbolts* that she carries an entire Marvel movie on her shoulders. She manages this throughout the otherwise largely cumbersome Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) proceedings all while making you laugh at her dark dry wit and delight in her tough, no-nonsense fighting skills. You believe in her nearly suicidal depression and even tear up a bit at her most poignant moment in the film. That’s when her character Yelena Belova’s normally stoic front breaks and she says to her estranged father:

Daddy, I’m so alone. I don’t have anything anymore. All I do is sit, and look at my phone, and think of all the terrible things I’ve done; and then I go to work, and then I drink, come home to no one, then I sit and think of all the terrible things I’ve done again.

I couldn’t believe she pulled it off, that first potentially cringeworthy line. Thereafter the speech is terrific. But that first line, I don’t know who else could’ve delivered it with such a perfectly timed little crack in her voice at the reversion to the childlike word “daddy.”

If you’re interested in the craft of acting, go see Thunderbolts* if only to wonder at the kind of skill that can ground the MCU in such emotional realism. Pugh even looks like a real person, making her harshly chopped hair and utilitarian jumpsuit seem genuinely her own.

Most Marvel actors can’t do what Pugh does here. For comparison, just look at Sebastian Stan (The Apprentice, Pam & Tommy), an actor I generally admire for his charisma and bold inventiveness. But here, he appears to be stumped once again by his glum Bucky Barnes aka Winter Soldier character. Perhaps paralyzed by embarrassment, Stan adopts a series of sullen tough-guy poses that have zero conviction, letting his leather jacket and motorcycle and shaggy hairdo stand for whatever the Winter Soldier is supposed to be.

David Harbour (Stranger Things) is good though, genuinely funny and touching, as he always is when he gets to play a paunchy dad character who’s loving but so faulty in his approach to parenting he’s constantly messing up and having to apologize. He was at his best when he first played this ludicrous blowhard Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian character in the enjoyable Black Widow back in 2021, with his acting game raised by the excellence of the women actors surrounding him: Pugh as daughter Yelena, Scarlett Johansson as older daughter Natasha Romanov aka Black Widow, and Rachel Weisz as wife, mother, spy, and scientist Melina Vostokoff.

Together they were playing a sleeper cell of Russian agents who weren’t actually related to each other but were pretending to be a striving immigrant family in Ohio. Of course, years of pretending bled over into real feelings and created emotional bonds along with enough trauma to keep them all in need of therapy for the rest of their lives.

Thunderbolts* is a very therapy-oriented movie, centered on an antihero/villain named Bob (Lewis Pullman) whose deep psychological wounds resulting from childhood abuse and his resulting drug-addled instability and periodic blackouts as an adult make him the perfect patsy for a manipulative sociopath like CIA director La Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). She has big ambitions to run the world and no empathy to stop her deadliest excesses. Out of Bob’s shattered personality, she creates a seemingly all-powerful superhero named Sentry who, unfortunately, generates a shadow side, a lethal alter ego named Void.

His most insidious ability is to plunge people into the scene of their most shame-filled interlude in life, and I have to admit, that’s a genuinely terrifying skill. Yelena, for example, finds herself back in Russia, a child assassin in training who lures another child trainee to her death in the woods. Even Vanessa gets immersed in her worst childhood memory, when as a little girl she inadvertently betrayed her father to his enemies, who murdered him. We’re shown several “shame rooms” where main characters got horribly damaged in the first place that hint at a vast accumulation of untreated psychological disturbance leading to a debased society.

In an age of disgraced and devalued superheroes, Vanessa employs our traumatized antiheroes as mercenary assassins — Yelena, Winter Soldier, John Walker aka Captain America (Wyatt Russell), the latest military hero to wear the star-spangled suit in spite of his dude-bro asshat qualities, Antonia Dreykov aka Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), and Ava Starr aka Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen). Vanessa regards them all as disposable and has a plan for getting rid of them when she decides they know too much about her top-secret achievement, Sentry. She assigns each one separately to do a rote assassin’s job at the same location, in order to eradicate them all simultaneously. This results in comical confusion as they all face off against each other, indignant at the perceived interlopers getting in the way of their actual “mark.”

The seeds of their status as the “New Avengers” are planted here, as these hostile antiheroes have to overcome their psychological barriers and old resentments to work together in order to escape Vanessa’s trap. The annoying asterisk in the Thunderbolts* title refers to an implied subtitle, which is The New Avengers. Isn’t that just what you were hoping for, the launching pad for a dozen more Marvel sequels?

Too bad, because the “Thunderbolts” name for this downbeat superhero crew had an amusing backstory about Yelena’s perpetually losing childhood soccer team. That name allowed the group to hang onto their endearing “loser” ethos and launch into action with an ironic cry of, “Go Thunderbolts!” But oh well.

Written by Eric Pearson (Transformers One, Black Widow) and Joanna Calo (The Bear, Hacks, BoJack Horseman) and directed by Jake Schreier (Beef), the movie has enough good acting, lively comedy bits, and cool effects to keep you going. The way Void eradicates people, turning them into chalky black silhouettes on the pavement, is nicely chilling, for example. That kind of imaginative image is needed late in the movie when the rote final fight scenes featuring all the usual massive urban destruction take over.

We’ve seen so many variations on these superheroes-save-the-world action scenes, it’s impossible not to feel jaded. But Thunderbolts* has Florence Pugh, plus just enough energy to make for decent, undemanding entertainment, and it’s doing pretty well at the box-office. Not fantastically well — nothing like those earlier years of almost guaranteed MCU movie bonanzas — because the public can only get burned so often. But well enough to keep the machinery clanking along generating profits for several more years anyway.