Thunderbolts*

This is the sixth and final film in phase five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and by my reckoning, it's the second best of the phase (after the third Guardians film). It's certainly an improvement on the flaccid Captain America: Brave New World from a few months back.

Kevin Feige has done a good bit of business getting the right team together here, not unlike the film itself. The reasonably unknown crew includes director Jacob Schreier, writers Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, and cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo. Schreier hasn't actually directed a feature for ten years (he's been involved in TV) but they all have some interesting credits to their names.

The film picks up the story of Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), adopted sister of Black Widow. She's taking jobs for Valentina de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), mostly illegal cleanup gigs with high body counts, but is becoming disenchanted with all the drudgery. She's in a murderous malaise. A fatality funk.

After visiting her adopted father Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour), Yelena calls Valentina to ask for a new position, maybe even a customer facing role. She's promised something when she completes one more job. As Valentina is being threatened with impeachment (sound familiar?) all evidence of her 'off the books' programmes needs to be extinguished. Enter Yelena. But when she gets to the designated compound she finds she's not the only one with a job to do. 

It's a proper old school set-up and it's deftly handled by Schreier. Yelena runs into the following reprobates, most of them with similar assignments to her: U.S. Agent John Walker (Wyatt Russell, son of Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell), Ghost (Hanna John-Kamen), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) and a civilian called Bob (Lewis Pullman, son of Bill Pullman). A fun scrap is soon followed by the realisation that someone wants them out of the way, they're the living evidence of past misdemeanours. Game on.

The film is quite well-paced, with an interesting discussion on mental health, not only Yelena's mounting loneliness. Most of this ragtag bunch have issues fitting in, especially Bob. His illness is really the crux of the story, the force that drives the plot. It's his discovery and subsequent change that requires the Thunderbolts to come together as a team, and in the process, sort out some of their emotional problems. It's a brave angle for this kind of film to take.

The introduction of the Sentry is finely devised. This is a character I first saw in the great Marvel comic series, World War Hulk, and his 'power with limitations' is actually reminiscent of Hulk in Avengers: Infinity War. He's probably going to be a vital addition to the group coming into the Doomsday and Secret Wars films in the coming years, but who knows which way he'll go?

The cast are excellent to passable with Pugh as the standout, and the interconnecting rooms of the mind was a neat way of exploring character. Another highlight was the clever downplaying of the new team at the end credits (The B-Vengers, Not My Avengers! headlines).

Look, obviously, it's not a perfect film. The whole family/team belonging theme is a bit mawkish, the Red Guardian's doofus shtick wears off after a (short) while, Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) was a bit under-served - for the second time in two MCU films within months of each other, and Olga Kurylenko was even more sidelined. Ultimately though, it works as an ambitious, almost indie-tinged emotional drama masquerading as a smack-bang-athon.

Thunderbolts is still showing around the traps.

See also:

Cate Shortland's Black Widow (2021) digs into the relationships between Yelena and her pseudo-family. There are also a couple of thematic links to a slightly underrated step-sibling, Josh Boone's The New Mutants (2020).