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

We're Back! a Dinosaur's Story - Getting Lost in the "Last Frontier of Imagination"

Last month, Variety ran a piece observing, “Hollywood Can’t Survive Without Animation. So Why Won’t the Industry Respect It?” by Clayton Davis, who reported , “In the nearly five decades that domestic grosses have been tracked, an animated film has finished the year as the No. 1 release just seven times, beginning with Disney’s “Aladdin” in 1992. Now the medium is having an unprecedented run, with “Inside Out 2” and “Zootopia 2” topping the last two calendar years (a first for animated movies to lead the box office for two consecutive years) and the latter becoming the highest-grossing animated film ever domestically. “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” is leading 2026 so far and is the only film to cross $1 billion. Setting aside the 2020 and 2021 pandemic seasons, which emptied theaters of family films, animated features have made up about 20% of the year’s 10 top-grossing releases over the past decade. And yet, the artists who make these movies have rarely felt less valued: In May 2024, ...

REVIEW: The End of Oak Street

There's something vaguely Spielberg about The End of Oak Street , and I don't really even mean the dinosaurs, which look quite a bit different from the CG masterworks of the seminal '93 film. The Platts are a conventional American family living in 1980s suburbia who are caught in a bizarre time anomaly that sends their entire neighborhood back to the prehistoric age. What follows plays like a more visceral rendition of '95 Jumanji . There's a very PG13 level of blood onscreen. But most of the anxiety derives from just how unceremoniously the dinosaurs are seen snacking on the neighbors. Without ever feeling like it's trying to outsmart the audience, the film drives home the idea that, yeah, if your street was sucked into a wormhole, the dinos would get you too--and probably without even needing to try hard. Among many other things, the movie is a masterclass in filmmaking tension. Amidst a stampede of gigantic fang...

REVIEW: The Rivals of Amziah King

The first note I made for this film is that I knew a bunch of cowboys growing up. But I regretfully did not know any who were just so willing to burst into song. I thought then that I knew what I was getting into with this movie. But I could not anticipate what this story would try to feed me. The movie sees Amziah King, a good-natured beekeeper, smalltown musician, and all-around good dude, sorting through some business deals as he happens to reunite with his former foster-daughter, Kateri. Crossing paths again allows them to mutually rediscover what they gave to each other as two people who lifted each other up. But when King's entire stock is stolen at the worst possible moment, Kateri gets to step-up and defend what is theirs. Amziah King is McConaughey at his most endearing. His ability to put the viewer at ease is the film's greatest trick. I've heard some buzz about this being his best performance ever. I'd...

My Criminal Father Surrogate: Masculinity in A Perfect World

I've been wanting to tackle the subject of "masculinity" in film for quite some time now, but I hadn't quite known how best to do that. There's a certain buzzword, "toxic masculinity," that especially elicits a lot of strong feelings from a lot of different angles. While a post-#MeToo world has exposed some very disturbing truths about the way masculinity has historically performed, I'm not here to roast 50% of the world population. Actually, I really want to talk about a man's capacity for good. Ted Lasso (2020) There’s certainly a lot of discussion to be had for newer media celebrating men for possessing attributes not historically coded as "manly." But what's even more fascinating to me are the attempts to bridge the gap between traditional masculinity and new age expectations--to reframe an older vision of manhood within our modern context. Which brings me to Clint Eastwood’s 1993 film, A Perfect World. ...

REVIEW: Star Wars - The Mandalorian and Grogu

I haven't historically considered myself a "Star Wars" kid. And to be clear, I take no pride in saying that or anything. I respect the property and what it's given to pop culture. But I do feel like it's worth mentioning in this review that I didn't really go into Jon Favreu's The Mandalorian and Grogu thinking I had much of what I'd call nostalgia for this movie to exploit. And yet watching this movie, I found myself hearkening back to the things about Star Wars that caught my attention as a kid. For me, that was the gladiator-style match in "Attack of the Clones." This film offers quite a few roller-coasters along those lines. And as far as the creature designs go for the monsters in these arenas, they were quite good. I wasn't trying too hard to anticipate which were computer-generated and which were puppeted, but the aesthetics of both the Jim Henson era and the Spielberg era sat very well here in this vessel....

Hating Disney Princesses Has Never Been Feminist pt. 1

Because the consumption of art, even in a capitalist society, is such a personal experience, it can be difficult to quantify exactly how an individual interprets and internalizes the films they are participating in. We filter our artistic interpretations through our own personal biases and viewpoints, and this can sometimes lead to a person or groups assigning a reading to a work that the author did not design and may not even accurately reflect the nature of the work they are interacting with (e.g. the alt-right seeing Mel Brooks’ The Producers as somehow affirming their disregard for political correctness when the film is very much lampooning bigotry and Nazis specifically). We often learn as much or more about a culture by the way they react to a piece of media as we do from the media itself. Anyways, you know where this is going. Let’s talk about Disney Princesses. Pinning down exactly when Disney Princesses entered the picture is a hard thi...

How Disney Liberated the Musical Genre

Anytime I’m getting ready for a new musical film, I generally try to put off listening to the soundtrack until after I’ve seen the movie. It’s just my way of ensuring that I experience the narrative in its full context upon its important premiere viewing. Most of the time I’m good about sticking to this, but nowhere is this feat harder than with the arrival of each new Disney musical. I tried really hard with Encanto , but with Lin-Manuel Miranda writing for Disney, what can I say (except "You're Welcome"...) So, why am I talking about Disney musicals? W hen I premiered my Jungle Book essay earlier this year, I decided that going forward I was ready to expand how I talked about Disney. Owing to Disney fans constantly having to justify their fandom, a lot of Disney discourse tends to be purely defensive. Disney fans only ever get to use their platform to try convincing the cool kids that--for the last time!--it's okay for adults without kids to go to...

REVIEW: Spider-Man - Brand New Day

Somewhere in the multiverse, there's an opening chord of a review where I celebrate Spiderman: Brand New Day as some kind of welcome "return to basics" for the MCU, but that's not more than partially true. This movie is a lot more straightforward than cohesive than most Marvel pics from the early stretch of the decade. Feige finally feels confident that, yes, we know that there's a multiverse, and we don't need more reminders. But this is also not a budget Marvel movie. The film still designs an elaborate fireworks show for Peter Parker to dance around. There is also definite signaling for future Marvel adventures. Sadie Sink's stealth role in this movie (a sizzling introduction into the MCU) teases the integration of a new family of superheroes set to join the ranks of The New Avengers. But these sneak peeks feel like just that, and unlike sloppier Marvel pics, they aren't made to bear the weight of the e...

Lamb: The Controversy of Vulnerability

In a landscape where the court of public opinion is ruled by sensationalism, where there is a reward for snap judgments and “thumbs down” reactions, it is imperative that we continue to train ourselves in the art of nuance and ambiguity. Some things aren’t easily classified as one thing or another, as good or bad, and they reveal limitations within our individual and collective perspective. This life and its overlapping matrices create more pressure points and junctions than we can hope to avoid. And so, we expose ourselves to contradictions not to desensitize ourselves or become permissive, but to add texture to our definitions. Which brings me today’s subject, Lamb, a 2015 independent film directed by Ross Partridge. Based on the novel by Bonnie Nadzam, the film finds a despondent 47-year-old man, David Lamb (played by Partridge himself), who strikes up a friendship with a neglected 11-year-old girl named Tommie (Oona Laurence). Their relationship is a sort of ac...

The Notebook Has No Excuses

The thing about film is … the more you think about it, the less sense it makes. Film tells us, even in a society obsessed with wealth and gain, “Remember, George, no man is a failure who has friends.” Film warns us that the most unnatural evil lies in wait at the Overlook Hotel and peeks out when all the guests leave for the winter–and that the heart of it resides in room 237–knowing we'll trip over ourselves wanting to open that door. Film is what makes us believe that the vessel for the deepest human emotion could be contained in a cartoon clownfish taking his unhatched cartoon son and holding him in his cartoon fin and telling him he will never let anything happen to him. Nights of Cabiria (1957) Even when it tries to plant its feet aggressively in realism, film winds up being an inherently emotional realm. We feel safer to view and express all manners of passions or desires here in the space where the rules of propriety just don’t matter anymore. So a fa...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog