One of the things that I liked about the Marvel cinematic universe in its initial phases was the fact that they were willing to reinvent. The reason why they had that edge in the superhero genre was because they were able to identify the burnout people used to feel about this particular genre. So, before the fatigue, they were able to tweak the existing template and bring something fresh. The past few years have been easily the lowest points of the MCU, mostly because it wasn’t able to reinvent things, and it also went after the reuse of existing tropes. The reason why the latest MCU entry, Thunderbolts, feels refreshing and entertaining is because it walks away from the kind of filmmaking we were seeing in the superhero genre. With the ultimate theme of the movie lingering around the idea of mental health and depression, Marvel almost pulls off a superhero version of something like an inside-out.
Post the death of her sister, Yelena is constantly haunted by this void inside her, and even though she is doing these missions for CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, she really wants to get a break from all this. Precisely, at that point, Val offers her that break if she can complete one last mission, and that mission had participants Yelena wasn’t anticipating. What that mission was and what its outcome was is what we witness in this film.
The impact of the consequences of this movie is almost on an Ant-Man level, in my opinion. Yes, it is introducing us to many key characters in the upcoming Avengers films, but the central event here doesn’t look like something that will have a snowball effect on the larger picture. Thunderbolts feels special because it uses such a seemingly inconsequential film to explore something different. The conflict here might well be the result of the usual greed of someone. But the solution they have cracked is more of a human story. The monologue we hear from Yelena, where she talks about the void she feels, has a significant role in the story of Thunderbolts.
While the humor in the narrative, which is almost spoofy in nature, is keeping us entertained like most of the films in MCU, the real deal is in the way they have constructed an antagonist. By making the demon inside a nice person the negative power, writer Eric Pearson gets to design a lot of setpieces and conflicts in the movie as visual metaphors of depression and healing. Just like how Pixar sort of managed to quantify the emotional space of the human brain, here the whole Bob episode becomes the true depiction of how trust, support, and faith work in the healing process of a person. Director Jake Schreier never really makes it that green-screen-heavy film. Most of the action we see in the movie has that real feel with blasts and crashes, and the most CGI-heavy ones are somewhat like dream sequences. Schreier stages many conversation scenes in the film on normal streets with people walking by looking at our main characters.
Florence Pugh gets to play the mellowed-down version of the cranky Yelena, who was perhaps the most empathetic person in the accidental gang. She shuttles between the fun bits and the emotional ones comfortably on screen. Sebastian Stan, as Bucky, is more on the lighter side here, with occasional swagger using his metal hand. Wyatt Russell reprises his role as John Walker, and since the movie is grouping and rooting for these loser characters, we get to see Russell perform the vulnerable side of the character. David Harbour as Red Guardian is that unrealistically optimistic cheerleader of the group, and he was super fun to watch. Julia Louis-Dreyfus reprises her role as Val and did a good job. Hannah John-Kamen as Ghost doesn’t have much to do here. Lewis Pullman, as Bob, is the new guy here, and he performed the various transformations of that character effectively on screen.
Thunderbolts had all the possibility to be an unimportant film that merely grouped these characters by throwing some random conflict just to make these losers a team. But, Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo use that freedom to push the movie to a space where the typical showdown we see would symbolize various phases in the mental health healing process of an individual. I am not saying that Thunderbolts will change things entirely for MCU. But, it instills hope in the fact that a segment of creators in the MCU are trying to think differently within the existing framework.
