Skip to main content

Thunderbolts* -- a review

I first saw actress Florence Pugh as part of an unplanned double feature with the movies Fighting With My Family and Malevolent. Fighting was a biography based on the life of British-born wrestler Saraya Bevis, better known as Paige in the ring. Malevolent was a horror movie about a brother and sister team of con artists who pretend to be ghost hunters so they can bilk their clients--until they run into some real life terrors. Both movies were very good, and I was really impressed with how completely different Pugh was from one film to the next.

And so I followed her career, which wasn’t hard to do, seeing how Pugh kept popping up in just about everything since then, including Dune: Part Two, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Pugh debuted in the MCU as Yelena Belova, the little sister of Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) in the enjoyable Black Widow. Pugh also reprised Yelena later that year in the shitty Disney+ series Hawkeye (Pugh imbued her scenes with some much-needed vitality in that otherwise lackluster show). Pugh is back as Yelena in Thunderbolts*, which has become my favorite MCU film of 2025 so far (I haven’t seen Fantastic Four yet).

When we first meet Yelena in Thunderbolts*, it’s in James Bond fashion, right in the middle of a mission for Valentina (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), her handler and overall boss. When Yelena expresses a desire for change, hoping to do more superheroic, “forward facing” missions like how her now-deceased sister did, Valentina sends her on one more shadowy spy assignment, which turns out to be a trap for Yelena and the other operatives. Valentina, facing a congressional inquiry into her shady dealings, sends an unknowing Yelena and the other operatives into a massive incinerator that's designed to burn away all evidence of them and their very existence.

But instead of dying, Yelena teams up with the other operatives, which include Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) from Ant Man and the Wasp, John Walker (Wyatt Russell) from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and…Bob (Lewis Pullman), a guy in pajamas with a bad case of amnesia. Thunderbolts* is not only a great deal of fun, but it’s damned funny, too--sometimes hysterically so (“Cucumber! CUCUMBER!”). When David Harbour and Sebastian Stan show up as Red Guardian and Winter Soldier, respectively, we begin to see an origin film about a superhero team, sort of.

Director Jake Schreier revels in pulling the rug out from under the viewer, who’s expecting the usual superhero tropes here, but gets some pretty ingenious twists and turns instead. And Thunderbolts* is all the better for it. While the heroes who form the Thunderbolts eventually step up and fight for humanity, it’s made very clear that they are not the A-Team; they’re a collection of C-listers who are simply trying the best they can, despite their flaws. This complexity of humor and drama is what makes Thunderbolts* a far better film than anything the MCU has fielded in theaters or on D+ recently.

I admit that I only saw this movie because Florence Pugh was in it, and while I enjoyed her superb performance here, I wound up really enjoying Thunderbolts*, the whole film, a great deal. The low quality of the more recent Marvel projects have made watching these movies and TV shows about as much fun as doing homework. But Thunderbolts* has brought back the fun--along with a healthy blast of wry humor--and I’m hoping that this engaging film marks a return to the long-lost glory days of the MCU.--SF

Thunderbolts* will be on Disney+ shortly, but it's available on physical media right now.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice -- a review

Despite coming out thirty six years after the first film, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice , once again directed by Tim Burton, wound up being vastly entertaining, adding lots of pleasant surprises, like the use of stop-motion animation. The sequel takes place within the same real-life time frame, with Lydia Deetz, played with wry humor by Winona Ryder, now the host of a ghost hunting show. She’s also the mother of Astrid, a teenager played by Jenna Ortega. They live with Delia Deetz (the always great Catherine O'Hara), Lydia’s step-mother and Astrid’s step-grandmother. After the death of Charles--Delia’s husband and Lydia’s father--during a bird-watching accident involving sharks, the Deetz ladies must go back up to the creepy house in Winter River, Connecticut for his funeral. This is the same place where Lydia first encountered Beetlejuice all those years ago, and she is understandably reluctant to even mention his name, lest she accidentally calls forth Beet...
Post a Comment
Read more

Explorer From Another World

It’s Friday night during the summer in Beutter county, an idyllic farming community in Indiana, and the good folks are settling in for what should be another humdinger of an evening. Until their plans are shattered by the arrival of an Explorer From Another World! This turns out to be an alien (Gemma Sterling) who starts savagely killing people from the moment it disembarks from its flying saucer. Local kids Eddie (Colin McCorquodale), Marybeth (Sage Marchand) and Culpepper (Nolan Gay) are planning on seeing a movie, but it looks like they’ll be battling for the very survival of the human race instead! Explorer From Another World is a wonderfully done throwback to the B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Ably directed by Woody Edwards (who gives himself a small cameo as Hank in the sheriff’s jail cell), the film is forty five minutes long, but manages to tell its torrid but funny story very effectively in the time allotted. And the short running time tracks when you...
Post a Comment
Read more

Jack Reacher Never Go Back -- a Review

I was first introduced to Jack Reacher through the Tom Cruise movie of the same name that was released back in 2012. I liked the movie well enough, despite a few nitpicks here and there--but I really enjoyed reading the novels by Lee Child. Jack Reacher was a former US Army officer who retires and becomes a drifter, roaming from state to state in the country that he fought so hard to protect. And Reacher is still protecting us, taking on a variety of villains, from backwoods mobsters to big-city terrorists from book to book. The stories in the books are well-told, with great attention paid to the smallest of details. I think of them as 1980s action films, only without being insulting to your intelligence. What a perfect series to adapt to movies, right? Well, Tom Cruise looks nothing like how Jack Reacher is described in the books. And while I thought the first Jack Reacher film was good, the second, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back , is very badly flawed. Based on the JR novel of the sa...
Post a Comment
Read more