After never quite finding the time or frankly the motivation to get out to the theaters to see Captain America: Brave New World I returned to my MCU in-theater franchise experience yesterday with Thunderbolts* I can say that skipping the last entry in the series made no discernable difference in the Thunderbolts* experience.
Marvel Studios
While this is team story, featuring Red Guardian (David Harbour) The Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), John Walker (Wyatt Russel), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) the story and the film really belong to Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) and her deep nearly debilitating depression.
Our heroes, following a betrayal that was intended to leave them all dead in order to provide a ‘clean record’ for their employer, unite as a fractious collective in order to bring the truth out into the open but along the way encounter an enhanced individual with powers of a magnitude as to make them physically unstoppable. In order to save humanity from an existence of never-ending darkness and depression the team must each face their own deep and persistent psychological traumas.
Directed competently by Jake Schreier from a script by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo with unflashy cinematography by Andrew Droz Palermo, Thunderbolts* is very much a return to form for Marvel feature films. It moves fast, uses a mix of humor and pathos to make each scene compelling and emotionally weighty and does not bite off more than it can chew in a feature film’s runtime. The film continues the Marvel Studio’s tradition of both a mid-credit and post-credit scene, but I would have flipped the order of their presentation. If you actually read the credit crawl just before the post-credit scene plays a clue revealing its nature slides across the screen, one that for me acted as a spoiler.
All in all, I enjoyed Thunderbolts* though there are bits and bobs that did not quite sit right for me, and I do believe that some of the characters were treated with less respect than their cinematic history required.
