REVIEW: Thunderbolts*

Ever since Star Lord and company discoed onto the scene in 2014, Marvel has basically been trying to chase the Guardians of the Galaxy high. And ever since we entered Disney+ era, that meant spray painting every project with a skittles color palette. And no situation couldn't be improved with a joke--any joke.

The premise of Marvel's newest film, Thunderbolts*, even bears some cursory resemblances to Gunn's film: it's an ensemble piece about former criminals trying to make good. But it winds up taking the opposite lessons from "Guardians" that movies like "Love and Thunder" tried to pilfer. And in the process, it actually becomes the first movie to successfully implement the Guardians of the Galaxy magic in a long time.

In a world that has moved on from the Avengers, six B-level heroes, many of whom have criminal history, are put in a position to take down a shared enemy. What begins as a non-aggression pact transforms into something else.

Beyond just a general understanding of character and growth, this film's greatest lesson from "Guardians" was how to balance tone. This is the closest thing the MCU has given us to noir film, both in terms of plot as well as the onscreen visuals. And yet, this film is still one of the funniest things to come from Marvel. And that humor arises very naturally, always justified by the characters and their situation. When four of these dum-dums start screaming "cucumber!" in rapt panic over and over, it feels neither intrusive nor base.

Our phase 1 veteran, Sebastian Stan, looks more than a little tired, but that only ends up working in his favor. He wears his hard-earned seniority well. Leave it to our resident Manchurian Candidate to become the steadying hand of the group.

Lewis Pullman is a welcome addition to both the Avengers specifically and the grander tradition of heroes. His chronic timidity opens up some variety and contrast in a genre fueled by action and conflict, and it's through the cultivation of his character that the film really proves it understands its own thesis: heroism has never been a matter of personal history or specific character traits.

Florence Pugh becomes our window into this world. Her disenchantment and altruism are in constant contest, even as her psyche bears the wears and scars of this long-running conflict. Pugh holds both of these things in her simultaneously and captains the moral arc of this story with something like grace.

Maybe there are no real secrets to this movie's success. It does what movies should do. Just as maybe there were no secrets to the MCU's derailment over the past few years. Some will look at that and cite it as proof of the genre's systematic banality or insipidness--just as they have ever since it took hold in the 21st century dialogue.

I disagree.

Superheroes form an important part of the cultural dialogue for what it means to be great. Ever since Heracles overcame his 12 labors, the masses have needed shared models for excellence and virtue. And it's here in movies like this with heroes like these that we draw this line between that which we'd call "super" and insecurity--those moments where we feel our least heroic. We will always need to bridge that divide, and we all need some shared language for describing when that mirror is reflecting honestly.

If there was a single secret to when a superhero movie is working, it's probably the one James Gunn himself handed us some years ago when he explained, "It has to do with the kind of stories that get to be told, and if you lose your eye on the ball, which is character. We love Superman. We love Batman. We love Iron Man. Because they're these incredible characters that we have in our hearts. And if it becomes just a bunch of nonsense onscreen, it gets really boring." I'm tempted to amend his prescription just a little. Thunderbolts* definitely courts nonsense, but because it never lets its eye off of character, it's anything but boring.

Whether or not this marks the healing of the larger MCU body remains unclear. Its passport will have to be renewed with each new offering. That's how it should be. Hollywood should never be complacent with these things, and we should never let them become so. But we can all take some reprieve knowing that the clock has reset for a moment.

For a moment.

--The Professor

Comments

"When Did Disney Get So Woke?!" pt. 1 The Disney of Your Childhood

So, I’m going to put out a somewhat controversial idea here today: The Walt Disney Company has had a tremendous amount of influence in the pop culture landscape, both in recent times and across film history. Further controversy: a lot of people really resent Disney for this. I’ve spent a greater part of this blog’s lifetime tracking this kind of thing. I have only a dozen or so pieces deconstructing the mechanics of these arguments and exposing how baseless these claims tend to be. This sort of thing is never that far from my mind. But my general thoughts on the stigmatization of the Disney fandom have taken a very specific turn in recent times against recent headlines. The Walt Disney Company has had some rather embarrassing box office flops in the last two or three years, and a lot of voices have been eager to link Disney’s recent financial woes to certain choices. Specifically, this idea that Disney has all the sudden “gone woke.” Now,...

"When Did Disney Get So Woke?!" pt. 2 Disney vs the 21st Century

In the first half of this series , we looked at this construction of the Disney image that the company has sold itself on for several decades now. Walt himself saw the purpose of his entertainment enterprise as depiction a happier world than that which he and the audience emerged from, and that formed the basis of his formidable fanbase. But because the larger culture only knows how to discuss these things in the context of consumerism, a lot of intricacies get obscured in the conversation about The Walt Disney Company, its interaction with larger culture, and the people who happily participate in this fandom. Basically, critics spent something like fifty years daring The Walt Disney Company to start being more proactive in how they participated in the multi-culture. And when Disney finally showed up in court to prove its case, the world just did not know what to do ... The 21st Century With the development of the inter...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

Recall with me, if you will, the scene in Hollywood December 2016. We were less than a year away from #MeToo, and the internet was keenly aware of Hollywood’s suffocating influence on its females on and off screen but not yet sure what to do about it. Enter Morten Tyldum’s film Passengers , a movie which, despite featuring the two hottest stars in Hollywood at the apex of their fame, was mangled by internet critics immediately after take-off. A key piece of Passengers ’ plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who prematurely awakens from a century-long hibernation and faces a lifetime of solitude adrift in outer space; rather than suffer through a life of loneliness, he eventually decides to deliberately awaken another passenger, Aurora Lane, condemning her to his same fate. So this is obviously a film with a moral dilemma at its center. Morten Tyldum, direc...

The Paradox of The Graduate

If you've been following my writings for long, you might know that I'm really not a fan of American Beauty . I find its depiction of domestic America scathing, reductive, and, most of all, without insight. I don't regret having dedicated an entire essay to how squirmy the film is, or that it's still one of my best-performing pieces. But maybe, one might say, I just don't like films that critique the American dream? Maybe I think that domestic suburbia is just beyond analysis or interrogation. To that I say ... I really like The Graduate . I find that film's observations both more on-point and more meaningful. I think it's got great performances and witty dialogue, and it strikes the balance between drama and comedy gracefully. And I'm not alone in my assessment. The Graduate was a smash hit when it was released in 1967, landing on five or six AFI Top 100 lists in the years since. But what's int...

REVIEW: ELIO

Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth. There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio , turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true. The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space? But m iracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador o...

Tangled: Disney Sees the Light

On November 21st, 2010, The LA Times ran its article “ Disney Animation is Closing the Book on Fairy Tales .” It pronounced that although the Walt Disney company was built on films in the style of Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid , that form of Disney magic was history, reporting, iCarly (2007) “Among girls, princesses and the romanticized ideal they represent — revolving around finding the man of your dreams — have a limited shelf life. With the advent of ‘tween’ TV, the tiara-wearing ideal of femininity has been supplanted by new adolescent role models such as the Disney Channel’s Selena Gomez and Nickelodeon’s Miranda Cosgrove.” “You’ve got to go with the times,” MGA Chief Executive Isaac Larian said. “You can’t keep selling what the mothers and the fathers played with before. You’ve got to see life through their lens.” Th e same day this article ran, the executives at Disney disavowed the viewpoints expressed and assured the public that Disney was NOT in fact s...

REVIEW: The Long Walk

I suppose we owe some respect to the new film adaptation of The Long Walk . Based on one of the earliest novels by Stephen King, this sort of ancestor to The Hunger Games sees a group of boys, living in an authoritarian society. willingly entering an annual state-sponsored competition in which they all embark on a nationwide walk, all maintaining a consistent walking pace. If they fall below that, they get a bullet to the cranium. Last boy walking wins. Full credit, there aren't a lot of studio films that stitch together a solid piece of entertainment with such basic materials. There's minimal computer-generation and only a handful of actors, none of whom are really household names. (The obvious exception being Mark Hamill.) Much of the film is portrayed in relaxed long-takes that really let the actors' charisma shine. This movie proves that creative film language can be enough to turn a walk down the country road into a full-on warzone. But the movie has a system error t...

My Crush on Sarah Connor is Hard to Explain

I had an experience this last fall working at a residential treatment facility for boys with behavioral issues. My boys had been dying all week to watch Black Widow. These boys very seldom got to watch new movies while they were with us except for special field trips or when on home visits, and this movie had only just become available on Disney+. The staff all agreed to let them have a special viewing as a reward for their deep cleaning leading up to Parents' Weekend. I was really proud of my boys for their enthusiasm. I took it as a token of their evolving social awareness that they were as excited for a female-led superhero pic as they had been for Falcon and the Winter Soldier. My boys were becoming little feminists, or so I thought. Imagine my disappointment when we finally watched the film and they spent the entire runtime catcalling Natasha and her sister. An entire film dedicated to a powerful heroine moving heaven and earth to ...

Do You Hear the People Sing?: "Les Miserables" and the Untrained Singer

Perhaps no film genre is as neglected in the 21 st century as the musical. With rare exception, the o nly offerings we get are the occasional Disney film, the occasional remake of a Disney film, and adaptations of Broadway stage shows. When we are graced with a proper musical film, the demand is high among musical fans for optimum musical performance, and when a musical film doesn’t deliver this, these fans are unforgiving. From the moment talking was introduced in cinema, the musical film has been a gathering place where vocal demigods assemble in kaleidoscopic dance numbers in a whirl of cinematic ecstasy too fantastical for this world. What motivation, then, could Tom Hooper possibly have for tethering this landmark of modern musical fandom in grounded, dirty reality? This movie’s claim to fame is the use of completely live-singing, detailed in this featurette, something no previous movie musical had attempted to...

REVIEW: The Legend of Ochi

This decade has seen a renaissance of movies claiming to be "this generation's ET ," but you probably can't remember their names any better than I can. We could have all sorts of debates why it is no one seems to know how to access that these days, though I don't think for a moment that it's because 2020s America is actually beyond considering what it means to touch that childhood innocence. But A24's newest film, The Legend of Ochi , does have me thinking this mental block is mostly self-inflicted by a world whose extoling of childhood is more driven by a dislike of the older generation than anything else. Fitting together narratives like How to Train Your Dragon with Fiddler on the Roof and tossing it in the sock drawer with 1980s dark fantasy, The Legend of Ochi is intermittently enchanting, but it's undermined by its own cynicism. On an island stepped out of time, a secluded community wages war against the local population of ...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog