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Marvel Comics and their screen adaptations have always been a singularly economical enterprise, with any superhero or villain, however obscure, always available for repurposing. Thunderbolts*, the latest addition to the cycle, features a new team of anti-heroes comprising characters from Black Widow, an Ant-Man film, one of the Disney+ spin-offs and who knows where else.
Part of the point is the entirely arbitrary notion of these particular characters coming together at all (the asterisk in the title seems fairly arbitrary too). They are a mix of disconsolate also-rans and world-weary ninjas who unite against an evil CIA boss, ripely played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus with a patrician sneer and a Susan Sontag streak in her hair.
The continually bickering line-up includes the bumptious Red Guardian from Black Widow (David Harbour, enthusiastically chewing on one of Hollywood’s better phoney Russian accents); Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), who passes through walls and shimmers a bit; a sourly macho failed substitute for Captain America (Wyatt Russell); Sebastian Stan as Bucky, the iron-armed Winter Soldier; and a mystery man named Bob (Lewis Pullman, not so much resembling a young Bill Pullman as, affectingly, a baby Harvey Keitel). And the ultimate enemy is, in effect, the very embodiment of existential despair (this is the first Marvel film in which characters exchange observations on Kierkegaard).
Above all, there is Florence Pugh as Black Widow’s adoptive sister Yelena Belova, a jaded assassin who starts the film establishing a note of fashionable “sad girl” melancholia, and spends the rest of it wreaking therapeutic havoc. Admirably willing to look sweaty and flustered throughout, Pugh is arguably the first actor to make a real flesh-and-blood character out of a sketchy Marvel premise.
Black Widow screenwriter Eric Pearson is joined by Joanna Calo, whose credits include Hacks, BoJack Horseman and The Bear, so it’s no surprise that Thunderbolts* is at the smarter end of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Director Jake Schreier emphasises a rare note of downbeat realism that acknowledges real-world physics — notably in a sequence in which, for once, masonry falling on New York actually looks as if it could kill people.
One always vaguely hopes to glean some political subtext from Marvel films, and Thunderbolts* is promising, not least as it makes a point of reminding us that in February’s Captain America: Brave New World, the US president became an uncontrollable monster. What slightly blurs the picture is that Stan — forever now associated with his young Donald Trump in The Apprentice — here looks disturbingly like JD Vance. And all these films, even with their government and establishment baddies, can be read as embodying rightwing populism as much as pop-culture anti-authoritarianism: that’s the canniness of the corporation behind them. One evident message, though, as the Thunderbolts fight to save Manhattan from being engulfed by a vast CGI cloud of transcendental Gloom, is a call to resist cynicism and despair.
However, any heartwarming pieties are overturned in the final twist, an outrageous self-reflexive turn that, among other things, mocks the very culture of fan expectation that Marvel feeds on. In this sense, Thunderbolts* comes within an inch of being the Barbie of the MCU.
★★★★☆
In cinemas from May 1
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