'Thunderbolts*' Is The 'Inside Out' Of The MCU
(Not complimentary).
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There was a period of about ten years there where it seemed like “origin story” was the only way Hollywood knew how to make a superhero movie. Hero acquires powers, learns how to use them, and becomes a better person just in time to keep the big bad from destroying the city (or country, or planet, or fabric of reality). Oftentimes this involved closing a portal. Sometimes it provided some laughs, like when we’d get to see Batman’s parents get murdered for the fifteenth or sixteenth time. But for the most part, we all knew the format, and we were pretty tired of it. And here’s where I have to admit something: Marvel’s latest, Thunderbolts*, made me miss origin stories.
Thunderbolts* is an attempt at a team-up, skipping past the part where they explore the perspective of an ordinary person thrust into the extraordinary. It makes some sense to skip past the type of story we’ve all seen umpteen times now, but team-ups — whether it’s The Dirty Dozen or The Avengers — tend to work better when each team member has a particular set of skills. Everyone in Thunderbolts* seems to have basically the same set of skills (usually ambiguous ones involving soldier serum and assassin training that vary from scene to scene).
It actually is an origin story, of a type, only it’s very transparently an origin story for a new phase of the larger comic book universe. That’s a lot harder to relate to than to a person, especially when you skip all the steps and the character differentiation that would normally make us care about such things. Even worse, the whole getting-the-team-together thing takes basically the entire movie, and so the story kind of ends where it should rightfully begin.
I don’t pretend to know the source material (and it feels like we’re well into the comic book b-sides and rarities now), but Thunderbolts* has the distinct whiff of that Guy Ritchie King Arthur movie that ends on a shot of someone fashioning a round table. Did they really make an entire movie just to explain the asterisk? It’s never great to sit through a two-hour movie and then get to the end and finally discover, “Ohhh, THAT’S why I was supposed to give a shit.”
Attention span doesn’t work retroactively. Despite this, Thunderbolts* joins a surprisingly rich genre of failed franchises that tried to start with a seminal event and then work backwards. Audiences don’t know much, but they can sense when a story is milking content or stalling for time, which is why the aforementioned King Arthur movie, Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, and countless other would-be franchise starters fizzled on the launch pad.
The MCU, obviously, is already well off and running, and so it’s more that this project has become so self-referential that it’s lost all human scale. They’re skipping all of the little human touches — powers-attaining and characterization and whatnot — so that they can get to… what exactly? The next “phase?” Who even cares about that besides an executive?
So Thunderbolts*, like Captain America: Brave New World before it, takes place entirely in the aftermath of “the blip” in Avengers: End Game. All of the original Avengers have been sidelined — legally, mortally, or otherwise — in ways deemed too complex to be worth exploring. I don’t believe they ever explained this satisfactorally in any of the actual MCU movies, and so I had to find a Reddit explainer. That this universe now needs a new gang of cut-rate Avengers seems, again, more like something for the business of Marvel than for anything organic to this story.
The Marvel braintrust itself seems to realize this, and so they spend almost the entirety of Thunderbolts* trying to disguise the astroturfed nature of it with a combination of soy banter and therapy speak. It works about as well as a call center employee trained to empathize. “I’m sorry, sir, I know how frustrating it can be when your superhero team has to reorganize…”
It’s all a cheap substitute for characters revealing themselves through action. But this story is so clearly just the coloring inside of a pre-written outline that the characters can’t reveal themselves through action. Or at least, that action is constrained. Characters can’t go where the imagination might take them, because all have to arrive at an already fixed point.
Like Captain America Brave New World, Thunderbolts* doesn’t even really have a villain — just a powerful guy who the heroes must teach to be nicer. Which they do by entering the landscape of his mind. What if the portal they had to destroy was inside someone’s mind, maaaan! “What if the enemy, was the inner me?” as Kimbo Slice once said. Imagine a climactic battle between the two wolves inside you.
It should really go without saying that internal conflict and actual superheroes are a bad combination. Why in the world would a story need demigods who can fly around and melt metal with their eyes if the whole thing is going to hinge on one guy’s internal psychological struggle between hope and despair? Isn’t the entire point of superheroes that they can externalize those things? Thunderbolts* basically sends Superman back inside Riley’s brain from Inside Out and expects us to be like, “Oh my god, he needs to destroy the portal so the little girl can remember how to play hockey!”
Right, so the plot: in the absence of the Avengers, we have CIA director Valentina “Val” Allegra De Fontaine, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfuss. She’s running a hush-hush experimental program to start up her own, presumably nefarious realpolitique version of The Avengers. The details of how one might go about trying to create a superhero are left hilariously vague, but suffice it to say, some politicians are trying to shut her down.
They anti-Valentinanites are led by Congressman Gary, played by Bunk from The Wire (Wendell Pierce). Frank Sabotka (Chris Bauer) is there too, proving that whoever is in charge of Marvel casting really likes premium cable shows like Veep and The Wire (Marvel guy, subscribe to Pod Yourself). What motive drives the Bunk faction? Honestly, hard to say. It seems even the Thunderbolts* screenwriters figured this key piece of the story was too boring to go into, so we merely get a congressional hearing in which Bunk tries to get Valentina to admit the existence of her program, and she keeps correcting him about the proncunction of her last name. “It’s DE Fontaine, not Fontaine!” Ha ha ha!
Meanwhile, Congressman Gary is turn trying to get freshman congressman Bucky Barnes, formerly The Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), to join the movement to impeach Valentina. I still have no idea how Bucky Barnes went from killing JFK and Black Panther to winning a bid for congress. I went to the Marvel Wiki to try to find out but I got bored after the first couple of paragraphs.
Anyway, Valentina is trying to cover-up her program before this congressional investigation can find it. And so she sends all her various super assassins — child soldier Yelena (Florence Pugh), failed Captain America John Walker (Wyatt Russell), and… uh… teleporting… robot lady(?) Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen) to her top secret lab housed in a mountain somewhere. The vigilantes think they’ve been sent there to kill each other and destroy the evidence, but really the goal is for them all to die, tying up all loose ends and covering Valentina’s ass in the process. Because I guess the CIA spook who controls a private legion of super assassins is really scared of a couple of congressmen? None of this makes any fucking sense!