But some of those dangling story threads are at last being attended to in Thunderbolts*, a superhero team movie that may bear a surface resemblance to similar entries in the genre, but actually has something interesting going on under its surface. Over the past several years, we’ve seen CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) recruiting some less than heroic super-powered folks for mysterious purposes. It turns out that Valentina has been running these people – including Yelena Belova, the sister of the Avengers’ Black Widow Natasha Romanov, super-soldier formula recipient John Walker, the techno-thief Ghost, and the mercenary Taskmaster – and when Congress gets wind of some of the unsanctioned black ops she may have ordered, she individual assigns each of the agents to dispose of another of the group. However, when they realize that they have been set up, they have to learn to work together to escape the trap Valentina had lured them into and expose to the world what she has done.
Perhaps a bit more than other Marvel Cinematic Universe fare, Thunderbolts* strays a bit from its four-color progenitor. First appearing in a 1997 issue of Incredible Hulk, the Thunderbolts were a new group of heroes, previously unknown to those in the Marvel Comics Universe and the comics readers as well. The group would go on to headline their own series, premiering a few months later. There it was revealed on the last page of that first issue that the heroes known as the Thunderbolts were actually a group of supervillains called the Masters of Evil, disguising themselves as do-gooders as part of a grander nefarious plot. Unfortunately for that plan, some of the villains discover that they actually like being heroes and the group breaks apart, with the want-to-be heroes striving to prove themselves worthy of that name.
But the core theme of the comic – coming to terms with the bad things in one’s past – remains here in the film. And this is what gives Thunderbolts* a bit more heft in terms of characterization than much of Marvel’s recent output. Florence Pugh’s Yelena is haunted by the death of her sister, Natasha. Her work as an black ops agent for Louis-Dreyfus’s Valentina is leaving her feeling more hollow inside and the psychological pressure of all of this is beginning to take its toll. It’s not often that a Marvel film, or any other blockbuster-level film, will deal in such things as depression and suicide ideation, but it is handled deftly and never exploitatively here. And these characters arcs about reaching towards redemption and learning to have the grace to forgive one’s self for past regressions don’t conveniently resolve just before the big third act punch-`em-up. Instead, their resolution becomes integral to the film’s climax in a way that offers a refreshing change up from the usual superhero sturm und drang.
Another element that helps Thunderbolts* stands out from more recent MCU is the film’s cinematography. Eschewing that usual Marvel flat lighting, director Jake Schreier paints the film in shades of gold and brown with deep shadows, adding visual dimension to the characters and their surroundings that illustrate their own darker psyches. An overhead shot of a hallway fight casts long shadows that presage a imagery from the film’s finale. In many way the film’s look is the most deviant from the standard Marvel cinematography since 2021’s The Eternals.
