An odd realization came over me while I was sitting through the fourth or fifth “bickering-as-banter” scene in a row during the first half hour of Jake Schreier’s Thunderbolts*: What, exactly, makes this different from your average superhero team-up movie? Modern caped-crusader cinema has a surplus of these types of features and very little of the ideal prick they’re supposed to kick against. Sure, there’s the Suicide Squad and Guardians of the Galaxy films, which were out-and-out depictions of fuck-ups trying to do the whole “hero” part of being a “superhero,” but Marvel’s approach to team dynamics on-screen and on-page has always emphasized its characters’ fallibility. Perhaps if the ’08 Writer’s Strike was averted and George Miller had made Justice League: Mortal, or there had been some Burton-era successor to the Super Friends, we might have had that ideal team of powered pals making a thoroughly righteous and competent stand against the forces of evil or whatnot. Instead, we have all-too-human egos struggling against one another while somehow saving the day, and it becomes hard to see what distinguishes a film like Thunderbolts* from its counterparts.
You could pithily describe Schreier’s movie as “Marvel’s Suicide Squad,” but its team doesn’t have the motivating factor that makes those movies interesting – namely, the self-interest that comes along with getting sent to (probably) get killed to win a reduction in their prison sentence (nor the level of imperial satire that came with James Gunn’s interpretation of the Squad as a biting critique of American black-ops adventurism in South America). Here, the team comprises assets that Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, unwittingly sporting a Tulsi Gabbard hairdo), director of the CIA, wants to be scrubbed from her history. There’s Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Natasha Romanov’s angsty sister; her adoptive father and big ol’ Russian goofball Red Guardian (David Harbour); Taskmaster (Olga Kuryenko), the mimicking assassin; the phase-happy Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), who turned to mercenary work after Ant-Man and the Wasp; John Walker (Wyatt Russell), the roid-ragey Captain America knock-off known as US Agent; and Bob (Lewis Pullman), a test subject from de Fontaine’s days as the head of a multinational biotech conglomerate.
If you look closely, you’ll see that there are three different shield-wielding heroes, two Captain America analogs, and a lot of intergenerational trauma. Who better to lead them than Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), a former Soviet assassin forgiven by the public and elected to Congress because he had the fortune of being Steve Rogers’ best friend. He comes into play a little later in the film, given that he’s not actively trying to be incinerated by the soon-to-be-impeached CIA director, which is how our friends wound up in this mess. Ostensibly, you’d figure that the story might be a revenge plot – misfits ganging up together to take down not-Selina Meyer – but in truth, it’s a group therapy session with desaturated colors and the occasional action sequence. See, Bob was the only survivor of a modern-day super-super-soldier serum project, which gave him Superman-like powers (a big deal for the low-level powers you see in your average Marvel character). Unlike Clark Kent, Bob didn’t have the best upbringing and has a fair share of mental health issues, which are somewhat yadda-yadda’d to genericism – the comics in which his character appears are clear that he’s got bipolar disorder, but Disney somehow thought it was better to make him a former meth addict with a whole host of other diagnoses for a recurring gag. The solar-powered Sentry represents his peaks, while his valleys are represented by the Void, the literal embodiment of self-destructive nihilism. So, the movie’s main thrust is rescuing Bob from de Fontaine as well as his own dark side.
These thematics aren’t particularly novel for Marvel, which has wrung pathos out of causality for practically every one of their team-up flicks. Avengers had Thor’s step-brother and a merry band of aliens destroy New York, Age of Ultron had a Tony Stark project drop a literal city on a small country in Eastern Europe, and the capstones of the Infinity Saga had Gamora’s step-father wipe out half of the universe. The shared-universe model has resembled a paint-by-numbers template more than a jigsaw puzzle for a while now, but it’s a particularly acute problem in Thunderbolts*. It’s not exactly surprising how much exposition the film has to deliver for you to remember something about these characters beyond their actors’ names, but it is somewhat disheartening to have to retread over Pugh’s past as a child assassin in the Red Room or Russell’s frustrations with his powerlessness at home to reach the “healing” resolution it eventually comes to. The film’s finale is quite literally set in a pocket universe made out of its characters’ worst memories, in which these diet Avengers have to assemble for a… metaphorical group hug. There’s no real satisfaction or catharsis in any of this, especially since Pullman’s character is so hastily introduced and his performance is remarkably static, having to exist as the source of the film’s pathos and its primary supply of non-sarcastic comic relief.
Schreier, for his part, tries his best to make the Merry Marvel Method bend to his will. The film begins with a solid action sequence that sees Pugh tear through a science lab full of goons, shot from a static spot above the fighting. It’s the best Marvel action in many years, though it’s quickly abandoned for more CGI costumes and hastily tossed together digital effects once superpowers come into play. There are good ideas animating these sequences (the scene in which the Sentry tears through the team is smartly planned but executed in a messy way, with the digital seams showing), but the Marvel aesthetic, as well as the desaturated palette — Schreier’s visual complement to his “dark” ethos – smothers the promise they hold. The ensemble is also shockingly bland – aside from Harbour and Pullman, the other members of the team have indistinguishable voices, with John-Kamen, Pugh, Russell, and Stan defaulting to gruff sarcasm as if their writer is merely having a four-way conversation with himself occasionally punctuated by Russian-accented enthusiasm. This makes the pop-therapy aspects of the story less successful: It’s hard to generate this much pathos for second-stringer “villains” in two hours, especially when we’re predisposed to rooting against them if they’re not one of the former Russian assets. It’s just abbreviated group therapy clad in faux-Kevlar spandex: A recitation of traumas without the added benefit of free coffee and powdered donuts.
This bitterness is at the core of Thunderbolts* and central to modern Marvel. If you were to trace the unifying animus behind the “Multiverse Saga,” it’s that Kevin Feige returned to form, reverting to the mean established by message board complaints when he was coming up as Avi Arad’s go-to producer: he wants his work to get darker so that it can be taken seriously. Even the successful pictures (Shang-Chi, Doctor Strange 2, Guardians 3) have had an edge to them that, had they been released in 2008 instead of the first Iron Man, would have made Marvel indistinguishable from the rest of the landscape, albeit with a little less of the “grittiness” that suffused that period’s productions. They have a monopoly on superheroes, at least for the moment, and their ubiquity, when paired with this lack of competition, means there’s no incentive for them to maintain the unique identity that they established. The shared universe model was wrongly cited as their primary appeal to audiences: Their tonal shift from the ever-present darkness of second-term Bush culture towards the sunniness of the early Obama days made their works novel and successful. Yet, with Superman, they’ve got a challenger seeking to counter-program against them as they did with Christopher Nolan in 2008. Is it any wonder that Marvel’s looking towards sunny idealism with the Fantastic Four, a functional superteam reigning in their retrofuturistic utopia?