When I think on Thunderbolts*, the newest episode of the world's longest and most expensive soap opera, I don't think "why" so much as "who". The "who" is both as in "who is this made for?" and "who are these people?". Thunderbolts* is not terrible. It just was there.
Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) is so tired and so bored with her job of being a hitwoman and agent to CIA director/Tulsi Gabbard lookalike Valentina de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). She wants out, or at least assignments that don't require killing and destruction. Valentina, facing impeachment for her nefarious work, agrees and has her take one last assignment: destroying a secret lab to cover up de Fontaine's nefarious work.
Ah, beware those last assignments, for this was really a trap to get all of de Fontaine's rogue agents to kill each other off. In a case of Spy vs. Spy, Yelena's intended target of John Walker/ex-Captain America 2.0 (Wyatt Russell) is there to kill Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen). Ghost is there to kill Antonia Dreykov/Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), who is there to kill Yelena. Out of this international Mexican standoff, only Starr manages her task. Exactly how random man Bob (Lewis Pullman), who is also in the lab, fits into all this we do not know.
De Fontaine, along with her excessively loyal aide Mel (Geraldine Viswanathan), is stunned to find that Bob is alive. He was a new experiment that managed to live, delighting de Fontaine. Not delighting her is how the other agents also live and are now on the run. Bob's powers are growing, but will de Fontaine manage to make use of them to starve off impeachment?
Into this comes Yelena's father, Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour) as well as Congressman James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes (Sebastian Stan). They join forces when they see that de Fontaine will not stop until they are killed and she gains full control over Bob. Bob is now de Fontaine's newest creation, Sentry. Sentry/Bob, who has struggled for years with both self-esteem and drug addiction, now grows both more powerful and more dangerous. He has the power to plunge people into shadow, requiring the newly formed Thunderbolts (Alexei naming them as such in honor of Yelena's childhood soccer team) to enter Sentry's void to sort out his issues. Will de Fontaine manage to get away with her new plan of "the New Avengers"? What of the mysterious outer space craft that the New Avengers/Thunderbolts see on the screen in the second post-credit scene, with a Number Four prominently displayed on it?
I do not know if it is a good thing that, while watching Thunderbolts* (the asterisk apparently to signal their unofficial name versus the New Avengers moniker), I actually wanted de Fontaine's plan for them to kill each other off to work. In a sense, it did: Taskmaster was killed. However, I think by now the issue with Thunderbolts* or any upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe film is that you need to know so much of what happened before that if you don't, you will be lost. At the minimum, you won't care. I remember Yelena and Alexei from Black Widow. I've seen de Fontaine before. I have seen Bucky before (and as a side note, never liked him).
However, Thunderbolts* really expects the audience to have an almost encyclopedia-level knowledge to know or even remember who the characters are. Ghost appeared in Ant-Man and the Wasp, which was seven years ago and who hasn't to my knowledge or memory been part of the MCU since. Black Widow was four years ago. That was the first appearance of Taskmaster. She pops up and is popped so quickly in Thunderbolts* that it is a puzzle on why she was there at all. There is brief mention of events from Captain America: Brave New World, which was a mere two months ago, so I guess that is an improvement. I never saw the Disney+ show The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, so this is my first introduction to John Walker. As such, I had a lot of filling in to do.
For those complaining that Thunderbolts* is the B-Team of the MCU (and to be fair, the closing credits naming them as such was a nice touch), I would offer that the MCU is digging deep into the barrel if your antagonist is Valentina de Fontaine. Julia Louis-Dreyfus' take on the character has always been more comedic in my memory, a bit of a bumbler who tries to be some sort of master manipulator and fails at it. I do not know if Louis-Dreyfus or director Jake Schrieder actually tried to make de Fontaine a true villainess. However, when Louis-Dreyfus as de Fontaine exclaims, "Righteousness without power is just an opinion," the audience laughed. Was that intentional?
One thing that I found also inexplicable is why Thunderbolts* was edited the way that it was. The film cuts between the four-way Mexican standoff in the lab and the Washington, D.C. soiree that de Fontaine is throwing. I think that Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo's screenplay wanted us to connect the two events. I just think that the back-and-forth did not work. I also do not know how Alexei went from being a limo driver in Mother Russia to a limo driver in Washington, D.C. who conveniently overhears de Fontaine's plans for the human targets. What exactly are the odds that Alexei would be the limo driver?
Worse is how what is meant as a tense action scene with Walker, Starr and Yelena escaping in Alexei's limo, the button that Alexei hits does not launch a missile but starts playing Ginuwine's Pony. It is enough to give MCU humor a bad name.
Again, when Thunderbolts* wanted to be exciting and dare I say sincere, it did not work. When Sentry goes rogue and becomes Void (whom I called Shadows because that is what he looked like to me), a lot of it had me rolling my eyes. Of particular note is when the various New Avengers started saving people from Sentry/Void's purging. All I could think of was, "if these people do not have enough sense to get out of the way when objects are flying about them, they kind of deserve to be crushed". By the time we get to Void's surreal world, I was as bored as Yelena was.
I think Yelena's boredom was actually Florence Pugh's boredom with being in Thunderbolts*. I'm sure that she was well-paid for her lack of efforts. She reminded me of Madeline Kahn's performance in Blazing Saddles to where she would make for an excellent Lily Von Shtupp parody. Given that Kahn's character was meant to be a Marlene Dietrich parody, I do not know whether that is a compliment or insult for Pugh.
Harbour was appropriately hammy as Alexei/Red Guardian. Thunderbolts* has two nepo babies: Wyatt Russell (son of Kurt and Goldie Hawn) and Lewis Pullman (son of Bill). I am not familiar with the previous work of either. I think Russell commended himself well as the obnoxious "Junior Varsity Captain America" as de Fontaine mockingly calls him. I was not impressed with Pullman, though to be fair Bob was not a particularly great character. Like another 2025 nepo baby, Pullman looks a bit too much like his father to let me fully separate them in my mind. Stan, John-Kamen and Viswanathan were fine but again, limited by the script.
The mid-credit scene was bad (Alexei harassing a random grocery shopper to show her his face on a Wheaties box) and the post-credit scene was there to connect Thunderbolts* to the upcoming Fantastic Four: First Steps. I did not hate Thunderbolts*. However, I did wonder that with them being the New Avengers, how will that work with the Young Avengers teased in The Marvels? In the end, to my mind Thunderbolts* are not go.
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