Thunderbolts is Andor for the MCU. That’s the comparison I used in my non-spoiler review, and I buried it at the very end of this conversation, so I’m putting it up top where it belongs. Star Wars is known for being kid-friendly and adventuresome, and then Andor showed up gritty and serious. This is the MCU being earnest, and it didn’t feel like a put-on.
Mrs. Know-It-All and I had just gotten out of the theater when we recorded this. At one point during the movie I wasn’t even sitting in my seat. What I said walking out was that this is just a movie, a really good movie. It has the beats of Marvel. But it had an engaging plot and people you cared about, and it’s the first time in a while I’ve thought of the word Scorsese uses. Cinema.
This is the full spoiler discussion, less of a blow-by-blow and more of what the two of us thought of the whole thing. If you haven’t seen it, why are you here?
Valentina and Her Broken Toys
The opening with Valentina at her impeachment, I could not care less about. It was a little cartoonish, and getting everybody to the vault site felt like the most contrived stretch of the movie. Once they were there, everything worked from that point forward. Mrs. Know-It-All pushed back on me, and she’s right: we needed it. Valentina had to stand there and point at every bad thing that might be coming, including a president who just turned into a big red rage monster.
That’s her whole argument, and you don’t think about it because we see all these MCU projects. The Avengers are gone. Sam Wilson is pretty much the only one around. What little they had with S.W.O.R.D. fell apart because of the really stupid and horrible Secret Invasion series. Captain Marvel has left the planet. So she’s trying to clean up everything ahead of the impeachment, and the people she’s been using are the collateral. She sends them all to one place to kill each other.
When they named the science research company behind all of this, I thought for a second they were saying Oscorp. As in Norman Osborn, Harry Osborn, the company whose boss becomes the Green Goblin. I was sitting there going, are they backdoor introducing Oscorp? They weren’t. In this movie it’s more like a BlackRock, one of those government contract companies, and what they were researching was how to make a superhero. Kind of like what was done to Bucky, just different.
These are broken people, and Valentina has been playing with them like broken toys because they could all be used. Walker wanted purpose after his whole debacle, so she gave him missions. I felt bad for Walker. They call him a dime store Captain America in this, which I thought was great, and he’s so depressed over what happened in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier that it’s infecting his marriage. His wife took their kid and left.
Bucky’s a congressman, by the way. For Brooklyn, and less than half a term in. People are asking him what he thinks, and he says his constituents are worried, so he’s going to look into this worriedness. Right on. You can tell he’s not the guy for this. And the man running the oversight committee is played by an actor who’s also about to be Perry White in Superman in two months, which is great. He was in Jack Ryan. I follow him on social media. His name escaped me the entire time we were recording.
Then there’s Taskmaster. She shows up, trades blows with Walker, Ghost takes her out, and that’s it. Maybe five minutes. I must’ve had my head under a rock, because apparently there was drama, and the actress wasn’t on any of the press tour. I remember seeing a clip of her saying something along the lines of most of her parts being cut. If you know what happened there, I’d love to know.
David Harbour Is What This Movie Needs
Red Guardian is the standout. If we didn’t have him, this would be a much darker movie. David Harbour is magical in this, and I was transfixed every time he was on screen.
He’s clearly broke as a joke, in his boxers and a robe, and there’s a knock at the door, and he starts in about how he put leave on doorstep in the app and you will be reported to DoorDash headquarters. He is as Russian as Chekov on Star Trek.
I didn’t expect the relationship between him and Yelena to go as hard as it did. I got emotional. Early on she asks him what all of this means to him, and he says it’s having purpose, serving your country, answering the call. Then the real key comes out, and it’s fame. He just wants to be recognized. In terms of strength and ability he could be Captain America, and the Red Room discarded him.
Later, after Sentry hands them their butts, she’s telling him they’re losers, they just lost, and she asks why he never came. He says, “I didn’t think you wanted to see me.” She says, “I did want to see you.” And then she calls him Daddy, and I was not okay. He raised her through the earliest part of her life. That’s the only dad figure she’s got.
Florence Pugh is doing amazing work in this thing. I liked her opening too. She’s talking, she steps off a building, and you find out she’s been saying all of it to a hostage. Her mind is somewhere else.
Mrs. Know-It-All has a theory I can see. All of those movies before Endgame were really about Tony Stark, and she thinks this next stretch might be about Yelena. At the press conference, when Yelena tells Valentina “we own you,” that was one more reason for her.
Bob, the Sentry, and the Void
I like Bob. He reminded me of the goofball on The A-Team, the way he kept frustrating Walker.
Mrs. Know-It-All asked me whether the Sentry is a good guy or a bad guy, and the answer is both. In the comics, Robert Reynolds has a separate personality, and it’s steeped in his depression. The movie dives into mental health a lot, with Bob and with Yelena. Touch him a little too long and you get pulled into a memory, one of your worst. With Yelena it’s when she was a little girl, and then a bathroom at a much lower point in her life.
Valentina’s assistant tries to warn her that the psychological profile on this guy is rough. Give the serum to somebody like Steve Rogers and you get Captain America. Give it to this guy and it’s bad. That’s something they’ve always maintained: the serum doesn’t make you a hero, it just gives you strength and agility. Red Guardian got it and he’s still a drunk bum. Absolute power corrupts, but if you’re already corrupted going in? Rough.
The first time they face him, it’s in the same place where the Avengers arrested Loki, and I got shades of Justice League, the team throwing everything at Superman and Superman not even being fazed. He grabs Walker’s shield and just bends it. Then Valentina says he was supposed to get rid of them, and Bob says, “Why would I kill them? They didn’t do anything to me.” That’s why we like Bob.
Then he starts getting uppity with her. She told him he’s more powerful than all the Avengers combined, and one of them was a god, so why is he taking orders? She can’t control him the way she wanted, so she goes for the kill switch. He stops her. Her assistant manages it, he drops, and he looks like he’s dead. That’s all the Void needed.
The Void is his depression, his anxiety, anything dark that ever happened in his life. When we first meet them, Yelena tells him you just push that stuff down. She has to come back and tell him she was wrong.
They shouldn’t have ruined the shadows in the trailers. Show people running. Don’t show them becoming that dark smudge. And he doesn’t kill them. He puts them in a nightmare, which Mrs. Know-It-All read as Bob still having a bit of a conscience in there.
Why Yelena Walks In
When Yelena walks into the Void, my first thought was that she’d finally reached the end, like up on that skyscraper. Nothing tells us there’s a way back out.
Mrs. Know-It-All had the smarter read. It was a fifty-fifty shot, but Yelena closes her eyes and has that meditative moment first, and that’s somebody making a calculated decision. She’d seen something in him when he was up in the sky. “I’m not so sure I’d have the same opinion if she didn’t have that moment,” is how she put it. That works for me.
So she’s stuck in her own memory until she figures out she can knock down walls into the next one, and eventually she sees Bob in a mirror and goes through it. The team follows her, because they know her well enough. I think it was Ghost who said it: if she did it, she did it for a reason. And I liked that Red Guardian believed she was gone. They had to hold him back.
I loved their hero moments before that. The rubble’s coming down, they’re catching things, and there’s a piece about to hit a little girl. Red Guardian catches it, she looks up at him, and he wanted that moment so badly. Then she disappears in a puff. I jumped. When the big piece comes down and all of them have to push it back together, I thought we were about to get the Avengers stance. We didn’t, and it made sense to me that the movie didn’t give it to them.
Inside, the environment starts fighting her the minute she tries to talk to Bob. Chairs flying. The team shows up, and the answer is to stop looking for the safe room and go right to his worst one, which is the first time he manifested as the Void, in the medical trial. It gave him power and it gave his other half power too. He talks about going really high and really low and then blacking out, and if I’m wrong about the definition somebody will correct me, but it reminded me of bipolar disorder.
I’m glad it’s PG-13. Mrs. Know-It-All leaned over during the credits and asked how you bring a kid to this, a kid who’s ready to see superheroes. It’s not a superhero movie. These are people in tactical gear facing unbelievable odds.
The New Avengers, Asterisk Included
The team goes after Valentina, she asks for one minute, walks them through a door, and it’s a press conference. She names them the New Avengers. That’s what the asterisk was for. In the comics the name comes from Thunderbolt Ross, and he’s long gone here, though they do name-drop him.
The credits run a montage of magazine covers, and I couldn’t tell if they were AI, the way the Secret Invasion intro was. They looked painterly, but a weird, flowing, moving painterly. You get the backlash in there too, the not-my-Avengers stuff. One cover has Walker on what I can only call a taco shield, because he kept the bent one.
At the very end they’re in the old Avengers building, looking a little ridiculous. Bucky’s hair is coiffed. Yelena is going for the wet look. And we find out Sam is organizing his own group and filing for the rights to the name. He’s got the shield, so technically he leads the team. So is there a fight coming, Avengers versus New Avengers? Hickman’s Avengers and New Avengers cover a lot of the ground this is inspired by.
I’m also sitting there thinking, devastating things just happened in New York City. Where’s Daredevil? Where’s Spider-Man? By Secret Wars some of these people are going to have to be carrying it.
Mrs. Know-It-All made a point I agree with. The kids who grew up on Spider-Man and Captain America are young adults now, and this is the more serious side of what it’s like to be a superhero, made for them. Same generation, continuing.
The Verdict
Thunderbolts is a 10 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index from me, the same number I gave it in my solo review, and Mrs. Know-It-All has it at a 9 out of 10.
Her one reason for the nine is that she would’ve liked to see more of Ghost, and more of this team interacting. They bicker a whole lot because they’re new to each other. Otherwise, a wonderful movie. Her words.
I’ve seen it compared to Guardians of the Galaxy, and I don’t buy that. It’s a Marvel movie like we’ve never seen. It worked in 3D, and I think it’d be just as good without it. Somebody close to us is seeing it Sunday, and the advice was to go in knowing you’re about to watch a dang good movie, maybe not the Marvel movie you’re expecting, because everyone judges these by Endgame and that’s so unfair.
I don’t think it gets any recognition from the Academy, because people hear superheroes and stop caring. But there are nuanced performances in this. It’s one thing to be the heroes. It’s another to be people on a redemption arc who then do the heroic thing.
I’m hopeful, and I hate to say that. I hope when they bring everything together, these guys don’t get lost in the shuffle and come out glossy. This movie’s not MCU glossy, and I’m okay with that. I dug the whole thing.
Your turn. When Yelena walks into the Void, is she giving up, or is that a calculated decision? Mrs. Know-It-All made her case and I’d love to know your read. And if you know the story behind Taskmaster’s five minutes, tell me. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
