Rooting for the Anti-Heroes
A review of "Thunderbolts*"
It’s hard to deny that a certain aimlessness has overtaken the Marvel Cinematic Universe in recent years. Despite a fair share of quality offerings since the release of Avengers: Endgame in 2019—the under-appreciated and slept-on Black Widow, the weird and wild Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and the swan-song Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 on the silver screen, for instance, and WandaVision and Hawkeye on the Disney+ streaming service—the sprawling film series does seem to have lost narrative momentum after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Indeed, the MCU barely regained steam before-off-screen issues forced a shift in narrative direction and the writer’s strike hit in late 2023. Nor has it settled on a new set of core characters to succeed the original six Avengers as focal points, in no small part due to significant gaps between the appearances of their possible successors—before her return in Thunderbolts*, the latest MCU entry released earlier this month, Florence Pugh’s master assassin Yelena Belova last graced our screens at the end of 2021.
If nothing else, Thunderbolts* jolts the MCU back to life with a return to the basics that drove the larger enterprise’s success: character-driven storytelling, charismatic actors with great chemistry, and meaningful action in the service of a bruised and battered humanism. These elements also make Thunderbolts* an excellent film in its own right, one that takes full advantage of its place in a wider narrative to tell a moving story about loss, consequences, and the need for personal purpose.
Contrary to those popular critics who claim that nothing matters in these films and dead characters don’t remain deceased—certainly true enough of the source material—Thunderbolts* reminds us that the MCU is in fact all about the costs and consequences of heroism. It’s something of a thematic throughline across the entire saga, one that can be seen from the very beginning in Iron Man and on through Endgame to Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Multiverse of Madness. And it’s particularly apparent in Thunderbolts*, where we see Yelena come to terms with both the loss of her sister Natasha Romanoff (aka Black Widow) and her own checkered (to put it mildly) past as an elite killer.
It's also present in the other main characters of Thunderbolts*. Wyatt Russell’s John Walker, the “junior varsity Captain America” introduced in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Hannah John-Kamen’s intangible Ghost, first seen in Ant-Man and the Wasp, both wrestle with their own personal failings and failures throughout the film. So too, in his own way, does Yelena’s surrogate father Alexei Shostakov, the one-time Soviet super-soldier known as the Red Guardian portrayed with gusto by David Harbour. At the same time, moreover, the world struggles to somehow find a replacement for the Avengers as Earth’s mightiest heroes—as exemplified by CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine’s (a cheerfully menacing Julia Louis-Dreyfus) amoral quest to create humanity’s ultimate planetary protector.
Still, Yelena remains the beating heart of Thunderbolts*—thanks in no small part to a stellar performance from Florence Pugh that both anchors and elevates the entire film. Yelena’s lack of purpose and self-confidence at the start of the film contrasts sharply with her Alexei’s uncomplicated view of heroism as a noble and desirable vocation. “There is no higher calling,” he tells Yelena as he encourages his surrogate daughter to follow in her late sister’s heroic footsteps and become the best version of herself. He reminds her that she’s got more to offer the world than her many mistakes and regrets, all of which leave Yelena with a dark and deeply distorted image of herself. In the movie’s climax, she gets the chance to prove it in a sequence cribbed from the very first Avengers film that sees Alexei vaulting her into harm’s way to save civilians in danger.
Much the same could be said for Walker, Ghost, and Lewis Pullman’s Bob Reynolds, all of whom simply want to be useful to others. Like Yelena, these characters all want to be heroes but feel burdened by their own disreputable pasts and very real character flaws. Walker, for instance, failed as Captain America, a husband, and a father, and, as Yelena points out, he knows it; only when he stops attempting to assert leadership over others does he find acceptance as a team member. Ghost is a spy and criminal whose reliability as a team player Walker calls into question more than once—yet she’s the first Thunderbolt to head after Yelena when she risks her own life and enters the Void. Bob has it worse as a former drug addict from a broken home, but he too wants to contribute despite his own considerable personal issues.
This desire to contribute positively to society ties into the film’s deft handling of its major thematic preoccupation: depression and existential angst. Yelena again serves as the focal point, feeling empty and adrift at film’s start as she nonetheless carries on with her work. Alexei mentions early on that her inner light is dim “even by Eastern European standards,” while she commiserates with Bob and his own melancholy when they first meet.
Indeed, Thunderbolts* conveys the loneliness, distorted thinking, and internal struggles with oneself involved in depression quite well. As she tells Alexei, Yelena does little else but dwell upon and ruminate about her past wrongs and mistakes over and over again, self-medicating with alcohol and social media. She refuses to look at herself realistically and remember what she’s done well in the past until Alexei gives her proper perspective. And she must deal directly with rather than avoid her past, fighting herself in the process—quite literally in both cases.
It all chimes quite well with both modern cognitive-behavioral therapies and ancient philosophical traditions like Stoicism and Buddhism. The former tells us to identify cognitive distortions and examine them rationally, while the latter reminds us that tackling our emotional and existential problems involves considerable effort and may, as the great Stoic philosopher Epictetus put it, require us to experience pain before we improve. Moreover, finding a sense of purpose and contributing to the common good features in both philosophical traditions like Stoicism and later evolutions of CBT like acceptance and commitment therapy. Yelena and the rest of the Thunderbolts do just that by the end of the film, when they save the day and the unscrupulous Valentina, her initial plan having backfired spectacularly, reveals them to the public as the New Avengers.
Serendipitously, then, Thunderbolts* also manages to come across as a refreshing antidote to the rampant egoism and selfishness that so disfigures our day and age. It may be a bit of a stretch to call a mainstream blockbuster movie that’s part of a multi-billion dollar film franchise countercultural, but a story about characters who seek a sense of individual purpose by doing good in and for the world despite their own profound personal shortcomings and extremely dubious histories certainly cuts against the grain of American public life today and so resonates accordingly. The idea that there is, as Alexei puts it to Yelena, a higher calling than self-aggrandizement throws into stark relief the ethos of our current political leadership as well as many members of our technological, media, and business elites.
More prosaically, though, Thunderbolts* single-handedly resuscitates the Marvel Cinematic Universe ahead of major tentpoles like Fantastic Four: First Steps and Avengers: Doomsday—just when it needed it the most. The film returns the MCU to its successful roots: Florence Pugh stars as the charismatic lead of a fine ensemble cast with obvious chemistry in a character-focused narrative with compelling core themes. It's also a welcome bonus that the superheroic concerns and musings of Thunderbolts* clash so strongly with the supremely self-centered zeitgeist that now prevails in public life.
For myself, I’m glad we’ll see the New Avengers (and Bob) again soon—and I hope the MCU can maintain its momentum going forward.
Great review, and I'm so glad that Marvel has had such success with Thunderbolts! I do sometimes wonder if folks have been too hard on the MCU's post-Endgame content, particularly Secret Invasion and The Marvels in 2023.