It’s taken six films in this misbegotten MCU phase 5 for Marvel Studios to finally acknowledge, if not tacitly, the superhero fatigue that has left even once-ardent Marvel fans feeling exhausted with the whole genre. This film, about a group of misfit heroes, assassins, and also rans who band together in order to save their own skin, begins with the usual MCU production opener, bright, energizing, and colorful, but it slowly drifts away from its spritely energy and comes to sound more like a dirge, the colors now muted and grey.
This emotional drop off tracks with the ambivalent mood of Yelena Belova (Frances Pugh), the “White Widow,” running through the paces of yet another deadly mission, while, in her own words in weary VO, “bored.” Sure, she takes out laboratory guards by the dozens, and completes her mission to wipe out the files and data from a secret lab, killing the scientists in the process, but she’s stricken with ennui. A joyless assassin for our times.
She’s still doing the bidding of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), the head of the CIA, formerly the head of underground weapons lab Ox Corp, who is herself neck-deep in a congressional inquiry led by a stalwart congressman (Wendell Pierce), looking not just to have her removed from office, but thrown in prison while he’s at it. To cover her very bloody tracks, she’s sent out Yelena, amongst various other covert operatives, to destroy any evidence of her previous wrong-doings, legion as they are.
All of which finally leaves only the operatives themselves as the remaining threat to her exposure, a situation she has her trusty aid, Mia (Geraldine Viswanathan), handle by sending them all after each other at a distant bunker lab somewhere in the southwest. Suddenly face to face with phase-shifting Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), and U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell), the four lethal combatants fight each other until they realize they’ve been set up, with the only other living soul in the lab the oddly disaffected Bob (Lewis Pullman), a bewildered patient in hospital pajamas, who has no memory of how he got there.
Escaping with their lives (mostly), they are eventually rescued in a beat-up stretch limo driven by Alexei Shostakov, the former Red Guardian (David Harbour), and once “father” to Yelena in a sleeper cell family of Soviet spies in the U.S., now gone to seed. The rescue doesn’t last long, however, before Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), the Winter Soldier, now a first-term congressperson from Brooklyn, captures them all in an attempt to finally stick Valentina with irrefutable evidence of her twisted past.
All this before the newly hatched group — christened the Thunderbolts after Yelena’s failed childhood soccer team — figures out exactly who and what Bob turns out to be (yet another moment where devoted Marvel comics readers will know precisely who they’re dealing with before the characters do), and just how much of a threat he could be in Valentina’s desperate bid for career survival.
If this sounds like an exhausting amount of exposition to wade through, you’re not wrong. But with a relatively strong script by Eric Pearson (Thor: Ragnarok) and Joanna Calo (“The Bear,” “Bojack Horseman”), and under a dedicated director in Jake Schreier, the film has more coherence and gravity than the recent offerings the MCU has been able to muster over the last few years. It’s not flashy, particularly, save for a few potent shots (one overhead view of Yelena as she mows down a squadron of guards, is actually pretty sublime), nor is it bracingly funny, exactly — though it does have a few moments: the side of Alexi’s limo reads “protection from boring evening;” Bucky cleans his robotic arm in a dishwasher — but it is more than competent. A film that knows what it is and is trying to achieve, and more or less accomplishes that task.
It even takes time out here and there for throwaway details that allow it to breathe at least a little. In one scene, Congressman Bucky, now back in his apartment after a gala event, spills marinara from a take-out container that splotches over his tux shirt while trying to answer the phone, in another, he offers a cut piece of cactus fruit to his fellow outcasts, who take a moment to enjoy its succulence.
It is also greatly enhanced from an energized cast, including star turns from Pugh and Louis-Dreyfus, as a slick, turn-on-a-dime politico whose every utterance is subject to change (a kind of dark(er) turn on her Selina Mayer character), and a stand-out shot of bouncy adrenaline from Harbor, the soul of the production, who infects his time on screen with a boisterous camaraderie that’s difficult to resist.
As can be expected, it’s not without its flaws. One character is unceremoniously dispatched right away in a bit that does next to nothing story-wise to justify it. The entire Bob situation is oddly configured, and exasperatingly vague. At its worst, it makes a bid for therapeutic mental health that comes across as both too preachy and too facile to land properly. By the end, Marvel is back to their old tricks of promoting the next few installments of this phase rather than simply producing a satisfying action flick unto itself.
However, one thing it does not fall prey to, unlike many, many films of its ilk, is to overload the climactic final battle with sloppy CGI and incoherent action razmataz in order to feel as if it’s culminated into something. It’s a peculiarly downsized sort of climax, but even that feels like a triumph over the standard dreck to which we’ve become accustomed, and the film’s final gambit, reflecting Valentina’s last gasp at saving her neck, actually does work pretty cleverly.
At the end of most press screenings, a PR rep stands just outside the doors in order to jot down short reactions from departing critics, gathering a quick check on the zeitgeist. As a rule, I try to avoid this exchange, but the word I came up with as I was making my way down the dimly lit stairs of the theater was “encouraging.” It’s highly doubtful the MCU will ever again ascend to the heights of Avengers: Endgame, in either emotional impact, or deep satisfaction of a cinematic journey, but if nothing else, this film proves the ol’ gal might have some life in her yet.
