#IGN #Marvel #MCU
Thunderbolts*, reviewed by Clint Gage.
Thunderbolts* is the most solid the sacred timeline has felt in a little while, providing an adventure befitting its overlooked title characters. While it very capably dabbles in a darker tone – touching on the mental health of heroes and villains alike – the filmmakers struggle to balance that dabbling with a snappy, comedic energy. While the movie as a whole left me feeling like it was a downer on the balance, it’s at least the good kind of downer, filled with characters I’m looking forward to seeing again.
#IGN #Marvel #MCU
Thunderbolts*, reviewed by Clint Gage.
Thunderbolts* is the most solid the sacred timeline has felt in a little while, providing an adventure befitting its overlooked title characters. While it very capably dabbles in a darker tone – touching on the mental health of heroes and villains alike – the filmmakers struggle to balance that dabbling with a snappy, comedic energy. While the movie as a whole left me feeling like it was a downer on the balance, it’s at least the good kind of downer, filled with characters I’m looking forward to seeing again.
#IGN #Marvel #MCU
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FunTranscript
00:00We are the Thunderbolts!
00:02Can't call ourselves that.
00:03God, thank you.
00:05Ah, so that's what the asterisk is for.
00:09Thunderbolts is a worthy outing for some of the MCU's unsung heroes,
00:12but just like the film's sort of not really antagonist the Sentry,
00:16it has both a dark half and a light half.
00:18One of them is actually pretty great.
00:20I'm Clint Gage, and this is my review of Thunderbolts.
00:30I'll admit I had a lot of hope for Thunderbolts going into it.
00:35Something's been in the air this last year,
00:38from the Doctor Doom and the Fantastic Four of it all,
00:40to the sense that we're through Phase Four's strange aimlessness
00:44and Phase Five is working towards something,
00:46and it's all got me more intrigued.
00:48There's been a sense lately, something that Anthony Mackie has even said out loud,
00:52that Marvel is set to recapture some of its magic.
00:55Thunderbolts, for the most part, is moving in the right direction,
00:58with a solid and fairly unexpected ride for its band of antiheroes.
01:02But early in the movie, there's a lot of exposition,
01:04and for a not insignificant amount of runtime,
01:07the movie belongs to Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Valentina Allegra de Fontaine,
01:11with Bucky Barnes kind of hanging on the periphery of her plotting
01:14in his new role as a politician.
01:16And more than anything, this early section of the movie had me wondering
01:19at what point it was decided to make the Winter Soldier a congressman,
01:22and if it was just kind of because one of the titular Thunderbolts
01:26should be around for all this early shoe leather.
01:29Once it gets properly moving, though, one of the things I like most about Thunderbolts
01:33is actually one of the things I like most about Infinity War and Endgame.
01:36Combinations of characters who've never met, but make for an interesting dynamic.
01:41Think of a whole movie built around moments like War Machine and Nebula bonding over the fact
01:46that they've both been put back together with mechanical appendages.
01:50The moments between Red Guardian and Bucky are very charming
01:53as they just kind of idly chat about Super Soldier serums,
01:56and Yelena and Ghost kind of gang up on Agent Walker to make fun of his hat,
02:00which is to say his beat-up, valor-stealing Captain America helmet.
02:04And not only is it really funny, it's used at the right spot in the film to the exact right effect.
02:09Now Marvel is kind of a factory at this point.
02:12Stories are almost always leading to the next thing more than they are concerned with what they're currently doing.
02:17The action kind of is what it is, and only really evolves around the fringes,
02:21so there's rarely something new to look at in that department.
02:24An MCU movie really gets a chance to stand out if it can bolster its more sort of workmanlike components
02:30with this kind of endearing material, and the parts of Thunderbolts' lighter half that work do just that.
02:35But it's an established relationship in Thunderbolts that shines the brightest.
02:39Florence Pugh and David Harbour were a blast as Yelena Belova and Red Guardian in 2021's Black Widow,
02:44and they're just as much fun here.
02:47The pair's father-daughter dynamic ranges from a real emotional need to embarrassing me in front of my friends.
02:53They're so clearly and so sweetly dependent on each other, it's difficult not to love them.
02:58And it doesn't hurt that Harbour is just chewing every piece of scenery he can get his metal teeth and Russian accent on.
03:04Oh, America's so big. You ever drive through Oklahoma so flat?
03:08For all these quality interactions between two or three Thunderbolts at a time, the team never quite gels as a whole.
03:15Director Jake Schreier and screenwriters Eric Pearson and Joanna Kahlo are aiming for a non-stop, snappy back and forth in the Guardians of the Galaxy mold,
03:23but their main characters don't live in that energy for nearly as long as they're meant to, or, more importantly, as long as they need to.
03:31Because while Yelena and pals are cracking wise, Thunderbolts' gloomier half is lurking just out of sight and ready to effectively bum you out.
03:39I'm not saying that as a bad thing.
03:41Louis Pullman's Bob and his journey to become the Sentry is a story about mental health and extreme loneliness.
03:47There are days when Bob feels very bit the Invincible Sentry and days when he can't help but let the void take over and wreak havoc.
03:54He's the exact right opposition for a character like Yelena, who's constantly questioning the things that she's done and how she should feel about herself.
04:02As Bob forces the members of the Thunderbolts to face the darkest times in their lives, the movie makes its most potent statements about how broken these people really are.
04:11There's actually a moment towards the end that had me scribbling in my little notebook in the dark in the theater.
04:16I wrote, that's pretty f***ed up.
04:18Normally, half the time, I can't even read my own writing at the end of these screenings, but that one I do remember.
04:23But this, again, is where Thunderbolts is really at its best.
04:27It's where the craft of the filmmaking team is on full display as well.
04:30Schreier has a bunch of darkly funny stuff on his resume, some of which even leans darker than funny.
04:36But my favorite member of the behind-the-scenes team is cinematographer Andrew Droz-Palermo.
04:41He shot both The Green Knight and A Ghost Story, two movies from David Lowery with very specific visuals speaking to a character's weaknesses and fears.
04:50Just look at how he shoots the one-against-many hallway fight in the film's opening sequence.
04:54This is one of the most basic staples of superhero fight choreography, right?
04:58We see it all the time, but this time, we see it from overhead, with stark black-and-white shadows stretched all the way across the frame.
05:05Even bearing in mind that, again, Marvel films can only sort of modulate their style of action and never completely reinvent it, this is some gorgeous imagery.
05:13And it speaks to the isolation Yelena is dealing with throughout the film.
05:17This is all to say that Thunderbolts truly excels with its darker, more upsetting subject matter and themes.
05:23And because these lows work so well, the highs, that don't quite have the energy they're aiming for, seem that much less high by comparison.
05:30And for me, it made the movie overall feel like kind of a bummer.
05:34A compelling and moving bummer at times, but I wasn't really feeling up for a silly round of petty bickering by the time the homestretch rolled around.
05:42There is one exception to that, which has to do with a chicken on meth that shows up in the third act.
05:47It was legit pretty funny.
05:49But think about the Guardians of the Galaxy and the way that it opens on a kid watching his mom die of cancer,
05:54and then nearly immediately follows it up with dancing and lip syncing through the title sequence, then forgetting he had a girl sleeping in the ship.
06:01Look, I'm gonna be totally honest with you. I forgot you're here.
06:04It's that sort of low moment to high moment that this movie is aiming for that it just didn't quite nail.
06:08Now, I do think there is some unfair pressure on this movie that I could be just as guilty of as anything else.
06:13But at this point, there is so much working against a Marvel movie. Phase 5 is wrapping up.
06:19We know that Fantastic Four and Doomsday and Secret Wars, they're all on their way.
06:23And that something that's in the air around the excitement for the MCU means that we just want all these big titles to get here.
06:29There's a certain feeling that Thunderbolts is a little bit of an afterthought, like it's the last bit of business before we get back on track.
06:36At the very least, I would have been more intrigued with the movie had most of the cast's name not already appeared on the back of directors chairs in the Doomsday cast announcement video that took that whole day to reveal.
06:47Now, I may also sound like an old grey chin shaking his fist at the clouds, but I can also imagine seeing a post-credits scene in a different timeline where I didn't know the next three or four movies that were coming out and losing my goddamn mind about what it was revealing.
07:01And of course, it's naive to expect that, and I for sure don't, but it's a factor in how we watch a movie like the Thunderbolts, one that's sitting right here on the precipice of the thing we've been looking forward to for so long.
07:12But you have the wrong people. We have all done bad things.
07:17Yelena, who's carrying this movie, has always been a little anti-Marvel, going back to the way that she made fun of her sister for being a poser.
07:25She's just the tiniest bit meta. It's what makes her great.
07:28So, it's fitting that at one point in Thunderbolts, she actually asks, what's the point?
07:33And this is a movie that is low-key wondering, is the MCU too big for a whole movie dedicated to a collection of side characters like the Thunderbolts?
07:40And the answer they come up with is, actually, yeah, they are alone.
07:44They are side characters that have to stick up for each other, and they are not the Avengers.
07:48Even though the climax, which we've seen in the trailers, takes place in and around Avengers Tower.
07:54Even though a lot of the visuals of that action sequence are pretty clearly meant to evoke the Battle of New York.
08:00And even though it references the 2012 Avengers film's production codename, which was Group Hug, this team is not the Avengers. Not yet, at least.
08:10And even with bigger MCU events on the horizon, just kind of hope we don't hold that against them.
08:14We all have things that we regret.
08:16But I have so many.
08:19Thunderbolts is the most solid the sacred timeline has felt in a little while, providing an adventure befitting of its overlooked title characters.
08:29And while it very capably dabbles in a darker tone, touching on the mental health of heroes and villains alike, the filmmakers struggle to balance that dabbling with a snappy comedic energy.
08:39While the movie as a whole left me feeling like it was kind of a downer on the balance, it's at least the good kind of downer, filled with characters that I am looking forward to seeing again.
08:50That's not good.
08:54There you go, that is my review of Thunderbolts. It was good. Better than okay. Not quite great, but real good.
09:00Let me know what you thought of the movie in the comments, and for more Thunderbolts, more Marvel, more scribbling notes in the dark that you can't read later,
09:08be sure to subscribe to IGN wherever you like to watch.