Thunderbolts* (2025)
David: Thunderbolts* is hands down the best Marvel movie we have seen in a long while. It plays like The Bad News Bears of The Avengers movies and feels fresh and offbeat.
The main character is Yelena Belova (the always fantastic Florence Pugh), a trained assassin now working as a contract killer for corrupt CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). However, to erase her criminal past, de Fontaine decides to have Belova and other killers she employs to all "disappear" by having them kill each other. Belova and the other mercenaries, "dime store Captain America" John Walker (Wyatt Russell) and Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), figure out what is going on and decide to work together. They also come across the mysterious Bob (Lewis Pullman) and Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour) as well as Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) shows up to help, too.
So, Fritz, I know you also like the film. Why did you feel that this was a good Marvel super hero movie, rather than just an insanely boring rehash?
Fritz: One area where Marvel movies, even some of the decent ones, struggle is the Third Act. Too often they bog down into "hero fights CGI effects of varying quality." There is CGI in the final act here, but the focus here is characters fighting their own demons, which is something I think most audience members will be able to relate to. We don't fight aliens or mutants or monsters, but we all battle our own demons and Thunderbolts* central theme is people coming to grips with their pasts, the ways they've been wronged, and the ways they've wronged others.
And if I was a parent, I'd appreciate one of the film's main messages to young viewers: when you're feeling alienated from everything, when it feels like the walls are closing in on you, you get out of that void by reaching out to others. So I felt more of an emotional kick to this one than most of the Marvel films.
What about you, Dave? What made it seem fresh to you? Marvel's done the outcasts thing already with Guardians of the Galaxy. Why did this still work for you?
David: I liked it for what you mentioned—about people battling their own demons. This is actually about something, which is dealing with loneliness and depression, and it makes you care about these characters. While the movie doesn't shy away from heavy themes, it is still a fun ride with lots of action and comedy.
Yes, there is a fair amount of CGI, but Thunderbolts* does employ lots of practical stunts and practical sets, and that really makes a difference. For example, there is actually a real stretched Limousine that is flipped into the air, and it's a cool as hell shot. The action scenes seem well thought out, and they are spaced out well. It's not a frenzy of constant action-action-action that becomes numbing by the midway point. When the action is revved up here, it's exciting.
Fritz: Yeah, I thought in the opening stretch, there was a very clever scene where Bob, Walker, Yelena, and Ghost have to figure out how to leave a seemingly bottomless pit. There was a level of imagination there that is missing from a lot of Marvel actions scenes, which often feel like they have been manufactured on an assembly line. I also liked how they handled Bob. I was never entirely sure whether or not he would be a friend or if they were going to have him go full villain.
Do you think this is a sign of a long-term "righting of the ship" for Marvel? Or is their saturate-the-market strategy of churning out films too much to overcome in terms of consistent quality? In our younger days, Star Wars released a new movie every three years, Indiana Jones did three over the course of eight years, James Bond and Star Trek did new movies every two years. They felt like events to their fans. But I think it's harder both to sustain quality and sustain fan interest if you're just churning out multiple films a year. I mean, even the franchises I mention turned out some clunkers with fewer films (I know you're not a Bond fan but even a Bond fan like myself will easily admit A View to a Kill was bad, except for its theme song).
David: I'm thinking that Thunderbolts* may be a fluke. The Marvel release before this, Captain America: Brave New World, should have been a grand slam, but it wasn't, seemingly because of too many cooks in the kitchen and too much second guessing with reshoots. And yes, there would be more anticipation if the movies were spaced out a year or two instead of having a new superhero movie coming out every month or so. Marvel Studios also needs to let filmmakers make the movie the director and writers set out to make instead of revamping the pictures after test screening them to death.
As for right
now, Thunderbolts* is a terrific surprise and definitely an "event
movie."
