Like most Marvel offerings, Thunderbolts* requires so much background knowledge that fine print seems appropriate, which may explain the asterisk at the end of the official name of the film. That typographical addendum, much discussed by Marvel fanboys during the promotional lead-up, turns out not to mean anything at all, unless one counts an in-joke “reveal” during the closing credits. To the critic, however, it is irresistible. Are our heroes not really streaks of lightning against a rollicking sky? Is Disney afraid of lawsuits? No refunds for the hopelessly confused! Yet this movie clearly has ambitions above its station. If the asterisk is directing us to look more closely, it is not an entirely wasted mark.
I went to see Thunderbolts* with an open mind and a blank slate, having never seen a Marvel movie before. It was, in one sense, easy enough to follow. The film is anchored by Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova, a Russian assassin previously featured in Black Widow (2021) and Disney+’s series Hawkeye. In what is only the first of many displays of antihero glumness, Yelena opens the movie with a voiceover confession: Summertime and the killing is too easy. Instead of checking in with her CIA handler (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) after an early job, the young woman visits her father, the Kremlin super-soldier Red Guardian (David Harbour), and receives a pep talk. Service to others, even in the form of lethal violence, can be a terrific way to add meaning to an otherwise empty life.
As it happens, Yelena is not alone in feeling down as the movie begins. The same is true of fellow superheroes Captain America (Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), all of whom have, to varying extents, been asking themselves hard questions. When, 20 minutes into the production, Louis-Dreyfus’s character attempts to murder the quartet, the better to bury evidence of her own corruption, one almost breathes a sigh of relief. Surely, sweet death is better than all of this griping.
Despite its surface comprehensibility, the first half of Thunderbolts* does not go well. How could it, given the practical impossibility of setting up a narrative that has, according to one online tally, more than 37 hours of backstory? Summoned to a covert lair, Yelena and company behave as if they have known and disliked each other for decades. But without the relevant context, the viewer is in no position to draw moral lines. Perhaps the Marvel addict, fresh off his day and a half of brushing up, can see past the aimless bickering into the crevices of these superhuman hearts. For the rest of us, it is a reprieve when an actual plot comes into view. An invincible madman (an effective Lewis Pullman) has appeared on the scene, and our protagonists must band together to save the nation from utter ruin.
In normal circumstances, it would be unsporting to complain that a comic-book movie has its own peculiar rhythms and rules. Just as my 12-year-old lacks the training to enjoy Tarkovsky, so I have no business jumping into the deep end of the Marvel cinematic pool. The counterpoint is that Disney has gone out of its way to market Thunderbolts* as a work of art that just so happens to feature characters with capes. The film’s trailer, titled “Absolute Cinema,” makes much of its creators’ previous credits on such pictures as The Green Knight and Everything Everywhere All at Once. Promoting the film to Empire, Pugh gushed that the final cut is “this quite bada** indie, A24-feeling assassin movie.”
About Pugh’s comment, two things must be said. To begin with, bully for production company A24 (The Lighthouse, Uncut Gems) for attaining such a reputation. More importantly, however, no, not a chance, not close. You absolutely must be kidding.
Though Thunderbolts* eventually becomes a tolerable if middling big-budget extravaganza, no person alive will mistake it for anything substantive. The film is too depthless, too willing to telegraph its every thematic move. Far from achieving the layered character work in which “indie” films specialize, Marvel’s latest might as well hand its protagonists “I AM UNHAPPY” placards, so unshaded is their performative ennui.
One could argue, of course, that such emotions are themselves interesting, signaling as they do what Disney executives think moviegoers want to hear. When I was a child in the ’80s and ’90s, the Mouse’s message was that romantic love conquers all (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast). Two decades later, it was that family trumps everything (Frozen) and that honoring one’s culture is the highest good (Moana, Encanto). With Thunderbolts*, Disney inaugurates a new idea: We are all staring into an existential abyss. If the average ticketholder is unmarried, unemployed, and uninspired, the film’s notion will make a good deal of sense. For the rest of us, it is merely strange and sad. About what, exactly, are we supposed to be so miserable?
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To be sure, Thunderbolts* has other problems. Louis-Dreyfus’s stilted line readings bring to mind a community-theatre novice on a bad day. The picture’s urban-carnage scenes are so unimaginatively filmed that they look like stock footage. The production has less than nothing to say about how mortal men and women live now, and it rarely grounds itself in the actual human experience. Yet the despair’s the thing. I can’t remember a mass-market movie that put quite so much emphasis on irremediable psychic pain.
A final, lighter note is worth ending on. The film’s best ingredient by far is the performance of Lewis Pullman, the son of Bill and a striking lookalike, as the supervillain Void. Should TriStar Pictures wish to remake Sleepless in Seattle with him and Colin Hanks, I will be there on opening night.
Graham Hillard is an editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.