Thunderbolts*

The past doesn't go away. So you can either live with it forever, or rehash it for another, less satisfying go

After 35 movies and some 18 or so TV shows (not including various bits and Bobs sprinkled across various media), where exactly does the excessively sprawling Marvel Cinematic Universe go at this point?

Like an aging rock band or pop star struggling to cling onto the remaining vestiges of relevancy, you play the “going back to our old stuff” card and hope you’ll find the path forward in the process.

Thunderbolts* initially feels like Marvel has finally figured a way out of its current mess by front loading the first few minutes with Florence Pugh, who is easily the film’s MVP and the lone bright spot across two hours of literal (and metaphorical) darkness. Pugh wrings so much charm out of a paper thin script and is somehow able to give Yelena’s “tired killer wants to change her ways” schtick some actual pathos.

There’s a hearty dose of wry humour, some nice action and stunt work that isn’t smothered with CGI, and some actual emotion that doesn’t feel like it was taken from an acting class exercise. Unfortunately the movie is titled Thunderbolts*, not Yelena and the Thunderbolts.

The Pugh-led North Star that Marvel desperately needs quickly reveals itself to be nothing more than a mirage. By trying oh so hard to rehash its greatest hits for the new era, the latest Marvel instalment veers deep into over-correction territory.

(A/N: Yes it made a lot of money, but I maintain that Deadpool & Wolverine is the biggest pile of trash ever put out by Marvel for the MCU.)

The early Marvel films were grounded in some kind of relatable humour and reality. You could just root for those characters, ya know? Thunderbolts* strains so mightily to have its characters be full-fledged people who like to express their feelings that it comes off like a second-rate Troy Barnes-esque “my emotions” display.

It doesn’t help that each Thunderbolts member we’re gradually introduced to has as much personality as their outfits (i.e not much). Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost has a cool power and nothing more, Wyatt Russell’s John Walker was a dickhead in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and is a dickhead here, David Harbour’s Red Guardian is loud comic relief with a Russian accent, and the less said about Olga Kurylenko’s barely-passes-as-a-cameo appearance as Taskmaster the better.

The talented cast do their best with non-existent material, but even they can only do so much when there’s nothing on the page. By the time the customary post-credits scenes roll, these Thunderbolts members are still just as nondescript as when we started and the team chemistry of the Avengers or Guardians of the Galaxy Marvel are trying to recapture is as elusive as ever.

But perhaps the biggest waste is Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (don’t forget the ‘de’), who is the CIA director pulling at all the puppet strings in the movie. With one of the most talented actresses in the world in your arsenal, I would’ve expected Valentina to at least be somewhat interesting, especially after all her previous appearances. Hell, I’ll even take a Selina Meyer knock-off operating at 40%. Instead, it feels like Louis-Dreyfus is just sleep-walking through the whole movie and doing the bare minimum.

Sebastian Stan doesn’t fare much better as bored-as-hell Bucky Barnes, who for some inexplicable reason is a Congressman. Thunderbolts* tries to squeeze some kind of neutral ‘‘Murica is great’ politics in there, but it comes off awkwardly. How could it not when the thought of a murdering assassin is voted into power is not that farfetched from reality?

Most of Marvel’s old tricks just don’t work in Thunderbolts*, which is why it is a pleasant surprise that the movie’s two new characters are among the more successful elements. Geraldine Viswanathan convincingly portrays Valentina’s morally conflicted assistant who has qualms over what her boss is doing, and Lewis Pullman’s Bob - an awkward yet sweet amnesiac with serious trauma - has level of nuance that most of the Thunderbolts wish they got. Equal parts innocent and exceedingly powerful, Bob is the perfect embodiment of the movie’s main problem of trying to be fun while having its characters trauma dump at any given moment.

Okay, so most of the characters don’t exactly work, but that doesn’t mean Thunderbolts* doesn’t have some nice tricks hidden away as secret tracks. Movies are not going to get any bigger in scale - or any worse in terms of CGI usage - than Marvel’s recent output, so it’s a somewhat refreshing change to have the set pieces and action scenes be relatively contained with less noticeable green screen usage. You can tell that the stunt team worked hard on this movie and they deserve all the credit for their efforts because you can tell that a good chunk of it is real and it’s fun.

The complete absence of any confusing multiverse rubbish that Marvel keeps trying to shoehorn into every movie and TV show also results in a final act that’s relatively small in scale while being visually idiosyncratic with some genuine emotional stakes. And boy does the movie lean hard the ‘emotion’ part of it. Think Troy Barnes screaming “my emotions” the sequel. Again, it’s massive kudos to the Pugh and the rest of the talented cast who somehow make all the cringeworthy dialogue work during scenes that are nothing on paper.

As a Marvel reset, Thunderbolts* works in some ways. But going back to the old stuff can only take the movie so far before several years of narrative and characterisation scar tissue weighs the whole thing down. All those built-up bad habits don’t go away in one movie, but it’s definitely on a better path than what Captain America: Brave New World left Marvel on.

It won’t reset the universe like the Snap but it feels like the skid has been halted for now. Let’s see what The Fantastic Four: First Steps and the next couple of Avengers films do with this little slither of momentum.