Thunderbolts*, the latest installment in the long-running, hugely successful Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), plays like a therapy session for a struggling franchise. This is mostly a good thing.
The movie opens with Yelena Belova, a former assassin trained in the same secret program as Black Widow, saying that she's bored. She's working yet another job that requires her to travel to some foreign land, infiltrate a lab, and take down a bunch of bad guys so that she can blah blah blah. Who even cares anymore? The whole routine has become tiresome.
Yelena's boredom is quite clearly intended as a reflection of the state of the MCU, which, after ruling over the box office for more than a decade, has been on unsteady footing since the pandemic. A handful of entries—Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings—have risen to the occasion, but too many of these comic book movies have felt dutiful and rote at best, and at times woefully misconceived, with rotten special effects and find-the-Easter-Egg plots incomprehensible to all but the most diehard MCU fanatics.
