Longer Storytelling Would Have Helped this Movie

I am just a humble reviewer. When I watch something, if I like it I say so and if I don’t I try to come up with ways that could have helped to show I’m not just crapping on a product but trying to see why it didn’t click with me. Sometimes my pulse on things is different from others, such as the fact that I absolutely loved Daredevil: Born Again: Season 1 and most commentators online said it was “just okay, kind of not great.” Meanwhile, for the recently released Thunderbolts* I felt it was just fine, good but not amazing, while others are calling the film “a true Marvel return to form.” I don’t see it, and I have my reasons for why (many of which I shared in that review).

Here’s the thing: I don’t think Thunderbolts* is a bad film. I enjoyed my time well enough during the movie, feeling like it hit certain beats really well (especially when it came to Yelena). At the same time, though, most of the characters felt kind of flat to me and the movie mostly operated on using our own knowledge of the characters to fill in characterization for them in the movie, even when those characters have only shown up once, barely had any characterization at all, and then vanished into the toy box until Marvel overturned it and fished their action figures out again. Characters like John Walker / U.S. Agent and Ava Starr / Ghost are barely seen and hardly known, so the movie trying to do shorthand for them doesn’t work. It needed to do better by its characters to make everyone feel like they were part of an effective team.

That’s why, in my review I said that it should have been a Black Widow sequel instead of a crossover team-up film. Marvel hadn’t done the work ahead of time to make an effective team-up movie, but a film focused solely on Yelena would work really well because, if you strip away the other characters and focus on what works in Thunderbolts* we effectively already have that. A movie about Yelena finding herself, learning to become a hero despite her past and the things she’s done, and earning her place on a team as a replacement for her dead sister is a satisfying arc that the movie pulls off really well. It just doesn’t do that for anyone else in the film.

There was a way the film could have done that, though, and it would have been by not being a film in the first place. I know in the past I’ve crapped on previous mini-series that the 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. has showcased but that’s largely because those series were just overly drawn out stories that would have been better if they were compacted, the crap removed, and turned into films. I’m sure some intrepid fan-editor is out there making superior cuts of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Secret Invasion that would make those shows watchable at movie length. Many of Marvel’s attempts at premiere television didn’t work, but that doesn’t mean the format can’t work. In the right hands, with the right concept, length and breadth can be a good thing and I think, in the case of Thunderbolts*, considering all it needed to do, the mini-series format would have been a better solution than a condensed film.

Oh yeah, and there will be plenty of spoilers here as I’m going to dice up the film as it currently exists and take those details to make something more fully realized for all characters. Be warned of that if you haven’t watched the film already.

The thought I had would be to focus each of the early episodes on a specific character. The first would be Yelena, where much of the intro act could be reused in this format. We open with her narration, discussing how she feels empty and unfulfilled in her life. She wants more, to be more than just an agent working black-ops wet-work. She doesn’t know how to get her life in order, though, so she’s seeking out someone that can tell her what to do. We cut to earlier when she gets the assignment sending her into a building to kill some people and cover up an experiment gone wrong. She has reservations but bottles them up. She talks with her dad, Alexei, but he keeps pushing her to be a hero and she doesn’t think she’s ready for that, or deserving of it. She tries to connect with an old friend, maybe Hawkeye, but he doesn’t have the answers she needs. Eventually she goes to do the job and it goes about as we see it in the movie, where she can’t cleanly tidy up things so she blows the building up instead. This creates a bigger mess and her handler, de Fontaine, decides that Yelena is a liability. When Yelena finally calls and says, “I need something more in my life,” de Fontaine promises that she’ll arrange something more “public facing”... after one more job. Yelena has to go to the vault and stop someone trying to rob the place. And so she heads out and the episode ends.

But instead of the next episode picking up from there, we go to a different character. Next would be John Walker / U.S. Agent. We see his life, him sitting in an empty house, his wife having left him and taking their child with her. Like Yelena he’s drifting, doing wet-work assignments but feeling hollow and empty. To draw a parallel to her, he could even try to reach out to some people, to talk, to find a way to be more than the failed Captain America reject. He could try reaching out to Sam Wilson, the current Captain America, but could get rebuffed. However, Bucky is at least willing to talk. They meet for a beer, have a stiff chat about the past, and Walker says that he needs a change. Bucky tries to talk some sense into the guy, but Walker is still too depressed to listen and it ends in a fight (maybe a fist fight since I’m sure people would want action and not a tense drama about depression). Eventually he gets a call from de Fontaine: do one more job and she could find a public-facing role for him as a true U.S. Agent, something he could be proud of. He gets sent to the vault, and the episode ends.

Then we move to Ava Starr / Ghost for episode three. We haven’t seen her since Ant-Man and the Wasp, even if she was supposed to appear in Avengers: Endgame but was cut. I think lampshading that would be amusing. She wanted to go where all the other superpowered people were, but she was stuck running an assignment: assassinating a rogue agent, Taskmaster, who had been killing U.S. assets. Except when she encounters Taskmaster she doesn’t see a cold-blooded killer but another damaged person, like her, who was experimented on and turned into a weapon and now doesn’t know what to do with her life. Instead of killing Taskmaster, she takes the girl under her wing and they develop a friendship (after a fight or two). This displeases de Fontaine as instead of one asset taking out another that proved unhelpful, she now has two disobedient assets. She promises to make their lives better after just one more job… and off they go to the vault.

The fourth episode then focuses on the interactions at the vault with each of the characters we’ve just watched meeting up with the other assets, having a big fight because they all think they were sent there to kill the others. Eventually they stop fighting, sometime after Bob is released from the cryocell holding him, and they all realize this was a trap set on them by de Fontaine. They make their escape, climbing their way out of the vault and then fighting past the CIA agents sent there to kill them. Bob does his noble sacrifice, helping the others make their break, and then Bob’s powers reveal themselves. And as he flies off, everyone around him stunned at what just happened, we cut that episode.

Episode five, then, focuses on Bob. We run two timelines here, one in the present with him waking up in a CIA facility watched over by de Fontaine as she plots and schemes what she can do with a powered up Bob, while the other is in the past, shown scenes from his childhood through adulthood. The abuse he took from his father when he was younger. The sadness he felt when his mother died. His descent into drugs, living on the streets. The experiment that was supposed to make him feel better but only made things worse by giving him superpowers. Meanwhile, de Fontaine is trying to turn him into her weapon, Sentry, who she can control. When the other heroes arrive, wanting to free their friend, they find Bob as Sentry, working for de Fontaine because she’s given him purpose. But his darker half is there, and as they fight it reveals itself, with the shadow person inside him eventually taking over. We cut the episode as he flies off, spreading a trail of people-eating shadow behind him.

And that can lead to episode six, which is essentially the climax of the film. Each character gets sucked into the Void, the dark place where Bob’s evil half lives. They’re all trapped in punishment rooms of their own making and, as they explore the Void they see their own pasts reflected back at them, making them relive the awful things they’ve done. But when they all finally reach Bob they also learn that there’s more to themselves than just the bad they’ve done, and they help Bob realize that as well. They help him escape, freeing him not through violence but through caring and sharing. This ends the threat of the void, and the city is saved. True heroes as they are, they then can be crowned as the New Avengers after a satisfying exploration of their characters and the story.

This mini-series version likely would work because it gives us the development for all the characters that’s needed so that we can care about them when they decide to become real heroes. But the fact is that if Marvel had spent the previous two phases actually utilizing these characters better and developing their arcs so they could come together as a team (Thunderbolts or New Avengers, either way) then the mini-series version wouldn’t be needed. The whole point is that Marvel didn’t plot any of this out well enough, trying to barrel through all the content of the last four years by the seat of their pants, and it led to a crossover film that lacks the satisfying development it needs. Thunderbolts* could have played like the Avengers crossover it was meant to be but Marvel didn’t put in the work for it, and it shows.

So yeah, in the end either we needed a longer for of Thunderbolts* or we needed more development for these characters over the last four years. A mini-series version is a band-aid to fix a deeper problem, but it’s one that would work. Still, in a choice between the two, I would have picked Marvel giving us two fill phases that didn’t suck so that the eventual crossover film didn’t have to rush to make us care about anything that was happening.

Again, I don’t think Thunderbolts* is bad, but it could have been so much better if Marvel were actually on their game. Everyone saying this is Marvel back in top form is missing the forest for the trees. This film was good enough, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Marvel of Phase I would have handled everything leading up to this movie, as well as this grand crossover, very differently. That’s the Marvel I miss, and this film feels like it was made by a different company. Likely because the Marvel we have today doesn’t even understand its own past success.