It’s easy to be cynical about Marvel Studios releases these days. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, after all, has felt adrift since Avengers: Endgame brought an 11-year saga to its glorious, bittersweet end. Apart from a handful of gems, the recent movie offerings from Marvel Studios have ranged from forgettable to outright awful, with fans forced to keep up with the absurd number of characters and storylines through multiple films and Disney+ TV shows. On the surface Thunderbolts*, directed by indie filmmaker Jake Schreier, seems destined to fall into such obscurity with its ensemble of characters, including Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes, and Wyatt Russell’s John Walker, coming from at least four separate Marvel projects, each of varying levels of quality.
Cynically, you could also say that the collection of characters are arbitrarily connected at best — feeling more like they were thrown together after screenwriters Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo were given the handful of characters that were still left in the Marvel toybox, and told to make something out of that. Cynically, you could say that Thunderbolts simply picks up ideas that other Marvel projects like WandaVision and Moon Knight have offered before, remixing them and honing them after they were previously flubbed. And cynically, you can say that Thunderbolts* is just another stopgap until the real heavy hitters like Fantastic Four and Avengers take the spotlight. And yet, despite everything it’s got going against it, Thunderbolts* is, surprisingly, really good.
