Rise of the B-Team

Marvel needs a win, and has needed a win for a while. I’ve been harping on this for a while, across multiple Marvel Cinematic UniverseWhen it first began in 2008 with a little film called Iron Man no one suspected the empire that would follow. Superhero movies in the past, especially those not featuring either Batman or Superman, were usually terrible. And yet, Iron Man would lead to a long series of successful films, launching the most successful cinema brand in history: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. projects (most recently a whole flurry of articles after the release of Captain America: Brave New World) but the fact is that Marvel has not been doing a good job at maintaining their shared universe in the wake of Avengers: Endgame. Phases IV and V have been a mess, with very few films that felt essential, let alone worth watching as idle entertainment. The company seems to be spinning its wheels, unsure of how to capture its past “Infinity Saga” glory, and it really just needs a film that gives its universe focus and power again.

Enter the Thunderbolts*, a film with an asterisk on it not only for its title but also what it means for the MCU going forward. The thing is that because the MCU was so messy for the last four-plus years (from WandaVision in January, 2021 onwards) we haven’t really had a good throughline for the franchise. You could point to “The Infinity Saga” and say, “Captain AmericaCreated by Simon and Kirby in 1941, Captain America was a super soldier created to fight Germany and the evil HYDRA. Then he was lost in the ice, only to be found and reborn decades later as the great symbol of the USA. and Iron ManBillionare Tony Stark has a secret: while he travels the world by day as a playboy philanthropist and head of Stark Industries, he combats the evils of the world as the armored Iron Man. defined the saga and through them we learned the story of the universe,” but we’ve lacked that same kind of dynamic in “The Multiverse Saga”. The lack of characters, of a main focal point, became the defining trait of these last few phases, to the point that, through Thunderbolts* (and Captain America: Brave New World, but the less time we spend discussing that bomb, the better) we the company acknowledging that, yes, things kind of fell apart.

To be clear, though, this movie isn’t really a Thunderbolts* film. While that’s the name on the tin, and that’s what the film is building to eventually (making a new team out of a disparate collection of characters), the film feels more like a Black Widow II than a proper showcase for all these “heroes”. Hell, even just calling them heroes feels like a misnomer. These are misfits and weirdos barely seen in the MCU before now, strung together because Marvel needed to cap Phase V with a group team-up, and this was the best they could come up with: a team of failures that you care about simply because one good character is sitting at the center of it all. This film isn’t about the Thunderbolts*, it’s all about Yelena Belova and her arc.

The film opens with narration from Yelena (Florence Pugh) explaining how empty her life feels. She’s running missions for CIA head Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), but she doesn’t get any personal fulfillment from it. She’s a wet-ops specialist with no friends, no connections, and nothing in her life that matters. Out of desperation she visits her father, Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour), and she tries to explain what’s going on in her life, but all he can do is talk about how she could be a hero, like her deceased sister was, and that doesn’t help her either.

Eventually she calls de Fontaine and explains that she needs something more out of her life. The CIA leader says that she’ll help Yelena find something more public facing… after she completes just one more job. Yelena has to go to a secret storage facility and stop a thief with special powers from running off with materials stored there. Except, it’s not just one person sent to deal with another; four special ops agents that de Fontaine has been running have all been sent there with orders to kill each other: Yelena, John Walker / U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell), Ava Starr / Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and Antonia Dreykov / Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko). What they also find down there is Bob (Lewis Pullman), an amnesiac who clearly is more than he’s letting on. The agents (and Bob) have to find a way to escape this vault, and then the men de Fontaine sends after them, all while dealing with an escalating threat that spells the end of humanity if it’s not brought in check.

Building the film around Yelena is a good call. She’s one of the few characters we know, having seen her more than most other characters across these two later phases of the MCU. And by that I mean we’ve seen her twice. John Walker disappeared after his introduction in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Taskmaster hasn’t been seen since Black Widow, and Ghost hasn’t been around since Ant-Man and the Wasp, which was all the way back in Phase III. By comparison, Yelena is practically a regular player, what with her two whole appearances. She’s right up there with Bucky Barnes (who has also shown up twice in these two phases), who also appears in this film.

That speaks to Marvel’s issue that they haven’t supported these characters, or this universe, as well as they could across these last four years. We’ve had more MCU content in the last four years than we had in the previous ten, and yet Marvel hasn’t managed to do much with this universe in that time. All the heroes that have been introduced have remained siloed off and separate, and the returning players, like Doctor StrangeSometimes thought of as the magical version of Tony Stark, Doctor Strange is the "Sorcerer Supreme", a mystic who was once a brilliant neurosurgeon until an accident robbed him of the use of his hands. But he found a way, in Tibet, to gain back not only his hands, but so much more..., make sporadic appearances at best and feel disconnected from everything. There are no Avengers anymore, this film tells us, and the arc of the last two phases (which was probably unintentional) backs that up. The universe needs a hero team and, lacking anyone else, this group of freaks and weirdos is thrown together, effectively led by Yelena.

Yelena is a great character. This film does a lot to help flesh her out, but she was already stealing scenes in her previous appearances in Black Widow and Hawkeye. She has a rich background, is primed for character growth, and is played fantastically by Pugh, so why not build a movie around her. I like that idea, and I think this film does a good job of that. Maybe, though, it should have just been called Black Widow II so that expectations for the focus of this film would be set. By calling it Thunderbolts* we expect the same level of development for all the heroes on the team, especially since we don’t know that many of them all that well, but the film stumbles in trying to make us care about anyone other than Yelena… well, and Bob.

Bob is the one truly new character introduced in this film and he and Yelena bond over their tragic pasts and feelings of emptiness. Bob becomes a way for Yelena to talk about and focus on her own issues, with solid caring and sharing moments that helps to build her up and build him as well. It actually is the right kind of platonic relationship to develop in a movie like this especially when (spoiler) he ends up being the main foe the team has to fight. Note, not the villain or antagonist, as that’s really CIA Director de Fontaine, but a foe of a different stripe.

I actually like this development a lot because it doesn’t just give us the same kind of Marvel villain we’ve seen so many times before. Yelena isn’t just fighting a bad guy version of a Black Widow. The Thunderbolts* aren’t simply taking on another team of Suicide SquadA team of villans forced to work together to do heroic things, the Suicide Squad is a team that works because of their darker motivations (and the fact that the team rotates in large part because they aren't expected to come back time and again).-esque villains. Thunderbolts* does a lot of work trying to fall into the same pitfalls of other superhero films, which is commendable. I do just wish that it had the same desire to build out its other characters as it does for Yelena and Bob.

John Walker, for example, starts the film as an asshole and ends the film as an asshole, something the movie even comments on. Yes, he joins in on the superheroics and ends up becoming a member of the team (such as it is), but he’s not vital as a character. He doesn’t get the same kind of development as Yelena, this despite the fact that we have effectively three Super Soldier, Captain America-adjacent heroes all on the same team. There’s Walker, and Bucky, and Alexei’s Red Guardian, but very rarely does the film point this out, and it never does it to have them actually develop themselves, or each other, as characters. U.S. Agent and Red Guardian are both effectively knock-off versions of Cap, but do they find common ground or work together on what it means to be made to be Captain America but not get to have the title? Nope, not one comments, which feels really weird.

Heck, in the case of Alexei, he’s simply there as comic relief. Don’t get me wrong, Harbour is great as the funny foil, and when he’s one-on-one with Yelena the film strips that comic relief away and it lets his character find pathos with his adopted daughter. There’s real character work here when the film wants it, but the film rarely finds that kind of depth unless it’s in service of Yelena… which gets me back to the idea that the film works best not as a team film but as a Black Widow sequel… which it really could have been.

Ghost is similarly underserved by the film, although apparently this was in large part due to script changes before filming (and at least Marvel did it before filming and not through extensive, costly reshoots). Ghost was meant to have a kind of sisterly bond with Taskmaster, but that was all cut (for reasons seen in the film that I won’t spoil) and that likely would have added more emotional depth to her character. The film needed that material, though, because as it stands Ghost, who we haven’t seen in years, shows up, acts sarcastic and mean, and then just gets to be on the team because she was there. It’s not great character work for her.

If this had been a Black Widow sequel instead, though, I think it could have been better. I’ve commented that Marvel really needed to focus Phases IV and V around a core set of key characters: Bucky, Yelena, and Sam Wilson. This film ties together two of those characters, Yelena and Bucky, and if there had been more material earlier (like Yelena being the Black Widow planted into the Ross Administration in Captain America: Brave New World) that could have helped to tie everything together better. Putting more emphasis here on Yelena, Bob, Alexei, and Bucky would have also focused the story better, and I don’t think it would have changed the overall path the story takes. Many of these characters are useless to the story, functioning simply so there are bodies to bounce dialogue. I get the need for that, so that characters can talk and keep the film lively, but there are better ways to do it than dredging up characters we don’t care about that don’t serve any other purpose than to exist.

This is Yelena’s story and, from that perspective, the film works. I love her as a character and I think Pugh plays her phenomenally well. I could watch more movies with her all day, and I hope Marvel does just that, casting her over and over again, making her a focal point of the franchise moving forward. But as a team up film, Thunderbolts* is lacking a little something. It’s fun and lively and it has good moments, but when the focus isn’t on Yelena it feels a little empty, a little flat.

Yes, this is probably the best Marvel film in. years, maybe even since Avengers: Endgame. It has style and substance in places and it’s fun to watch. But considering the other films Marvel has cranked out since Avengers: Endgame, calling Thunderbolts* the “best” of the lot since feels like a back-handed compliment. It needs a pretty massive asterisk at the end of the statement, one even bigger than the asterisk at the end of the film’s title.