(courtesy IMP Awards)
Once as close to a sure thing as any blockbuster can be, Marvel’s prodigious output of epic superhero storytelling has stumbled more often than not over the last few years, offering up films that felt they were mere Xeroxes of the studio’s previous glories which, if you can recall their heyday, were impressive indeed.
If you have wondered if Marvel could ever recapture its larger-than-life, if often formulaic successes of old, then welcome one and all, misfits and powerful alike, to Thunderbolts* (now rechristened, apparently, and yes this is a ———- SPOILER !!!!! ———- The New Avengers; hence the weird, seemingly disembodied asterisk) which is a rip-roaring trip through the physical, emotional and mental horrors and joys of what it means to be human.
That’s remarkable in some ways because while the superhero films of Marvel were often diabolically impressive in scale and impact, they didn’t always have a ton of humanity infusing their narratives; yes, there were achingly sad or searing moments – think the farewell to Iron Man or the original Captain America’s departure – but overall, the movies, while enjoyable to sit through, popcorn in hand, never really left you feeling like someone had excoriated your soul.
But Thunderbolts*, oh my lord, Thunderbolts* goes for the psyche jugular, offering up a soul-shuddering journey into the very darkest places of humanity’s often broken existential state and asking what can be done, if anything, in the face of such powerful trauma, grief and pain?
Because in this particular slice of blockbuster superherodom, the villain, such as they are, is not a monstrous being from another dimension nor someone from an alien world, but a man, hotwired with some pretty ferocious powers, who, in the grip of horrific past experiences that have never been dealt with or excised (if such a thing is possible; my therapist says no) seeks to draw everyone around him into his nightmarish slice of busted-apart personhood.
Known as the Sentry – who he is is best left to the watching of Thunderbolts* because therein lies a lot of the film’s emotional power and its tremendous sense of seismically affecting humanity – this creature of roiling, empty pain on a graphically massive but emotionally intimate scale (“I am a void. You can’t outrun the emptiness.” is so full of so much psychic injury that it manifests as a shadowy blight that begins to encompass all of humanity, beginning as so many Marvel movies do, with New York City).
Given the power of his horrific pain, which has been been given a potent and little thought-through boost by a CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus is boisterously, darkly hilarious form; she eats all her lines with gusto and then asks for more) who, wants power more than anything, ethics and morality be damned – though there is one moment where we see the scared little girl inside who is generating a fearsomely mocking adult persona – you have to wonder who could possibly stand against him?
After all, the Avengers as we knew them have exited stage left and there seems to be no one left to take their place, leaving Earth and it’s much put-upon citizens virulently exposed.
Enter Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh who is movingly magnificent as the beating heart of Thunderbolts*) and fellow misfits – Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Yelena’s humourously gung-ho dad, Alexei Shostakov / Red Guardia (David Harbour) and Ava Starr / Ghost (Hannah John Kamen) – who start out being used by Valentina as evidence-clearing pawns in a grand blame-erasing scheme before accidentally becoming the most unexpected of good and wonderful things – a found family.
With each of them burdened by sins aplenty – especially Yelena, who feels she has done far too many bad things to be forgiven – they regard the idea of them being heroes, singularly or collectively as some sort of mad, twisted joke, leaving unable to rise to any of the many challenge that come their way in the film.
But Bucky Barnes sagely intones as one point that “The past doesn’t go away. So, you can either live with forever or you can do something about it.” and it’s these words that begin to resonate among this motley crew of heroes who realise in the film’s blockbuster big final act, which doesn’t take the route you might expect from Marvel’s past bombastic efforts, that the past can be forgiven, the present remade and the future changed just by some very simply but incredibly momentous decisions.
There are action scenes and titanic battles galore as you would expect from a Marvel effort, but every single frame of this singularly affecting film is imbued with the transformative idea that we don’t have to be a prisoner of our pasts (and, as we see in some remarkably intense flashbacks, these are pasts full of great pain and menacing brokenness) and that it is possible to fight back for the life we want to lead.
But as Thunderbolts* makes painfully but liberatingly clear, getting to that point of freedom is not an easy road to travel and much of the charged brilliance of the film comes from the way in which all the characters, but especially Yelena, have to confront their trauma and often in fairly full-on situations.
In fact, as the beating heart and soul of the film, and someone who have endured great slabs of pain intuitively comes to understand what healing, such as it is, might look like too, Yelena leads the charge to defeat the villain of the piece in ways that are as much about the Big Bad’s road to recovery as that of the misfits team that opposes him.
A brilliantly invigorating return to form that serves up huge amounts of action and blistering narrative momentum, Thunderbolts* almost feels the world’s biggest and most transformative therapy session, one which knows how crushingly terrible the weight of a catastrophically damaged past can be, but also how the road to healing, or something approaching it can be, can not only save a person but the world as a whole and remake the fabric of reality into something far better than before.
- And yes, there are mid (hilarious!) and end credits scenes so keep your butt in your cinema seat and settle for some tasty peeks at upcoming films, The Fantastic Four: First Steps and Avengers: Doomsday.