It feels like I’ve been living in a void for months. Prone to depression even in good times, the culture of the country in which we live has grown sour, and we have entered one of the darkest periods in recent history. We are more divided than ever. Everything about our way of life seems to be under attack. I’ve heard again and again that no one is coming to save us. There are no heroes anymore.
So, I went to the movies to find a little comfort in those celluloid arms. I’ll be honest, I’ve not even bothered seeing the last Captain America movie, and the last few before that were relegated to the living room. I wasn’t sure I could bear another disappointment, even from the land of make-believe.
But damn, the Thunderbolts* really got to me.
None of these folks are heroes either. At least that’s what they said. Just a bunch of rag-tag characters who played minor roles in bigger Marvel movies. Most of them were even villains, or at least the anti-heroes, in other people’s stories. There’s Yelena Belova, Bucky Barnes, the Red Guardian, Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), John Walker (Wyatt Russell) — who was Captain America for, like, two seconds, and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko). All of them have been broken and summarily recruited by the new shadow government being formed by Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. All of them are little more than mercenaries and thugs, and it’s getting to them.
We open with Yelena (Florence Pugh) perched on the side of a building, dismal sky above, looking more like an A24 drama than a superhero movie. Her voiceover lets us know that she’s in a dark place, having lost purpose and hope. Then she jumps. It’s all part of the action scene that follows, of course, but it sets the tone.
She reconnects with her foster father, the Red Guardian (David Harbour), long enough to realize that he’s not doing much better. She decides that maybe she’ll do one more job before calling it quits.
Meanwhile, Bucky (Sebastian Stan) isn’t doing well as a senator. He’s trying to play the good bureaucrat to get things done, but the corrupt never play fair. Valentina has been called before a committee that wishes to impeach her. It’s obvious that she’s going to get away with all of her nefarious activity, and the way Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays her makes it all feel too believable. There’s a smug and smarmy grin to every line she delivers that could come right out of a real-life press conference.
So, our protagonists naturally converge in a predictable stand-off, like a Tarantino comic book. Not everyone survives. It’s here where we meet Bob (Lewis Pullman), who just seems to be hanging out in this abandoned warehouse. But Bob is not what he seems. Valentina has been up to even more shady shit than we thought, and our shaky new team will face a challenge that they are sure they cannot overcome.
I won’t spoil anything for you. It’s not a complicated story, though, allowing the characters to breathe and interact with each other. It feels like it’s been a while since Marvel did this, and it’s what made the movie for me. Yelena really connects with Bob, both of them fighting their own inner demons. They have a great chemistry onscreen that drives the plot more than anything.
You see, Bob has struggled with his mental state for a very long time, like the rest of our team. But when super-powered experiments are performed on an unstable mind, bad things happen. This is where the movie went beyond big screen spectacle and hit me right in the feels, provoking more emotion than we tend to get from superhero flicks. Bob is struggling, and so is Yelena. When Red Guardian tries to tell her that they have all done things they regret, her eyes well up with tears. “But I’ve done soooo many things,” she says. Not gonna lie, I was crying, too.
They are right, of course. The obstacle they face IS much greater than them, and as the void begins to overtake the city, everything seems lost. It’s a superhero flick, so we know that’s probably not how it’s gonna end. But the way our heroes decide to fight . . .
It got me again.
Sometimes, all we can do is to take a deep breath and just push into the darkness. It’s the one thing that we might all have in common. No, we might not think we are heroes, but to stand up and fight the evils of the world is nonetheless a heroic act. We might find that together we can overcome anything.
Oh, and make sure to stick around for the post-credit scenes. The final one had tonight’s audience cheering.