Starring: Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, Olga Kurylenko, Lewis Pullman, Geraldine Viswanathan, David Harbour, Hannah John-Kamen, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus

Directed by Jake Schreier

Marvel/Disney

A group of antiheroes have to work together…

After the out of place Brave New World comes Thunderbolts*, a film about a bunch of losers who find themselves out of their depth. The premise is interesting because for the first time the MCU abandons its slavish adherence to the hero’s journey and serves us up something slightly different.

This isn’t a radical film, it’s still a Marvel movie and there’s plenty of action and set pieces but Thunderbolts* is notable for several things, most of them good.

Firstly, it’s funny. It really leans into the absurdity of what a superhero is in a way the more po-faced MCU entries complete forget to their own detriment. This absurdity doesn’t look at the camera and wink – no, it’s entirely contained within the story and the characters’ own reflections on their successes and failures. The structure is very loose with locations but that feels deliberate – as much because the story here is really about how lone mavericks are, basically, failures and, probably, mentally unwell to boot.

Secondly, there is a strong focus on mental health in this movie. I’m not sure it entirely works. Having suffered from depression myself I watched several of the threads that touch on this subject and didn’t quite know what to think.

It’s never played for laughs and, ultimately, the movie is careful to say that you can’t beat mental health challenges by ‘just getting over it’ or by ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’. It goes so far as to say that trauma is a big trigger (but not the only cause) for poor mental health outcomes and that we have to deal with them, but in our own time and we have to find people we can trust to be by our side not only while we recover but also in those spaces between identifying we need help, getting it and then living with who we are in the long term. The truth is that for many people who suffer from challenges like this there is no ‘getting better’ – it is who we are, neither a super power but nor a fatal flaw that needs to be beaten into submission.

At points it almost suggests that being depressed is villainous but I think it’s more subtle than that – it knows that the black dog is a monster, an enemy we’d rather not have in our lives because of the damage it can do and it plays to that in the same way that the movie Everything, Everywhere, All at Once did with its Black Bagel.

By and large I think Thunderbolts*’ ambition to explore this subject works. It is certainly respectful without being dull, tone deaf or wearing kid gloves. For that it gets my thumbs up.

The structure of the film also works for me. It’s not about overpowered lunkheads beating the snot out of each other for two hours. The truth of the matter is that the protagonists in this film are secondary characters to other, more powerful MCU heroes and they know it and we know it. This means that when they come up against a threat whose stakes are meaningful, they are overwhelmed and unable to meet it head on with violence. This is really refreshing, to see underdogs who have to think about who they are and what really matters rather than just resorting to punching their opponent in the face.

This ties into the movie’s themes nicely because the structure of the film takes us not to a climax that is a huge battle but to something more heartfelt, funny and, honestly, interesting.

I’ve written many times about the traps superhero narratives lay for themselves. Thunderbolts*’ approach to this largely avoids these pitfalls because it’s interested in trauma and loneliness and how we built community. In that it’s subtly subversive for a Disney movie.

Where it doesn’t quite work for me is in two specific spots. This is the second movie in a row where we have the primary threat be so overwhelmingly powerful some other trick is used to solve the problem. Sam Wilson faced an enraged Red Hulk. The Thunderbolts face something even more devastating (and the two movies do tie together on that note). While I applaud the attempts to set a different path the resolutions here are just a little too similar.

The second is about Yelena. Her sister, Natalia, was a red room operative who fell in love with a man who had mental health issues (anger!) and was the only one who could reach him. Yelena is a red room operative who ends up caring for a man with mental health issues and is the only one who can see how to reach him.

This parallel might have felt smart on paper but it’s hugely disappointing in reality because we have two women wrestling with their own lives, their own actions whose journeys come to be seen as defined by their relationship to troubled (and more powerful) men.

Once is fine, it’s a tragic love story. Twice is… problematic. It would be nice to have someone like Yelena defined on her own terms.

This is before we get to the point that the Thunderbolts is a team largely made up of murderers. This is joked about but unlike the way trauma and mental health issues are presented, it’s not really addressed in any meaningful way. I suppose that as with like a character such as James Bond we’re probably supposed to just accept the deaths of others without comment because it’s part of the plot. I’m also not convinced that having cold blooded murderers represented as the heroes we need is a great message. I may also just be taking it too seriously.

Verdict: Either way, Thunderbolts* is a funny, refreshing entry into the MCU. The story is interesting, the characters have space to develop and the themes are unexpected in a good way.

8 black dogs out of 10

Stewart Hotston