Escaping the Void: A Review of Thunderbolts*

The Marvel Cinematic Universe hasn’t done itself any favors since Endgame (2019). Between emasculating beloved male characters, inserting contemporary ideology at every turn, and generally sacrificing good storytelling on the altars of agenda, Disney has managed to turn a multi-billion-dollar franchise into a string of box office duds. Thanos with his gauntlet couldn’t have ruined things any more thoroughly than has Disney with its blinkered ideological commitments. But amidst the wreckage of the post-Snap MCU, the studio has managed to produce at least two decent films. One was Guardians of the Galaxy 3; the other is Thunderbolts*. 

Thunderbolts*  follows a list of B and C-tier characters from Marvel’s slate of recent (poorly received) films and Disney+ shows as each stares into his own personal abyss and tries to answer the question, “Why am I even here?” The question works on two levels, serving the immediate needs of the film while inquiring whether the MCU can still be salvaged. The story opens on Florence Pugh (Black Widow) as she battles loneliness and ennui. In a brilliant opening shot, she leaps from a skyscraper—the actress performed this stunt herself!—only pulling her parachute’s ripcord at the last possible moment before listlessly executing her duties. Wearing her despair on her sleeve, Pugh’s performance grounds the entire film.

In short order, the new Black Widow finds herself lured to a hidden bunker with several additional MCU rejects, each of whom has apparently been sent to execute the others. Wyatt Russell (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier), Hannah John-Kamen (Ant-Man and the Wasp), and Lewis Pullman each put in good performances, with Pullman’s “Bob” character stealing the show. In a belated nod to fan feelings, Disney’s gender-swapped version of Taskmaster also makes a satisfyingly brief appearance before exiting the MCU, hopefully forever. Joined by Red Guardian (David Harbour) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), the surviving characters execute a daring escape only to realize something the audience already guessed: there’s a lot more to “Bob” than meets the eye.

As the trailer already reveals, Bob is actually the godlike Sentry, whose powers exceed all the original Avengers’ combined. Their new mission becomes about taking him down, an impossible task as Sentry is Marvel’s version of Superman, a being with “the power of a million exploding suns.” Things go quickly south when Thunderbolts’ amoral mastermind Valentina de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) tries to mold Sentry to her will and instead unlocks his dark side, the Void. The Void is a manifestation of Bob’s loneliness and hopelessness, and it threatens to plunge the whole world into his own private abyss. Thankfully, the film does not ask us to believe that these second-string characters could beat him in a straight fight. Led by Florence Pugh’s Black Widow, they find another way.

Thunderbolts* does a great job, at least, of exposing and actually naming the great Achilles heel of modern “self-determined” materialist existence, namely the threat of meaninglessness. This battle with meaninglessness is given physical form in the Void aspect of Pullman’s character and in many of the visuals that portray the internal architecture of Bob’s mind. All the main characters put in solid performances, and characters who were unlikable in their earlier MCU appearances are fleshed out and made sympathetic. Despite its cosmic threat, Thunderbolts* drama plays out on a more personal scale than most superhero films, and its “psychological” resolution works well within the structure of its plot and themes. Still, the film gives no real or satisfying answer to the larger questions it raises about objective meaning; the purposes or goals of human life as such. Its therapeutic angle is not wrong, just woefully incomplete, for the problems raised are of an eternal nature and the solutions proposed are merely temporal—only human. 

Aside from this, my only quibbles are with the standard Marvel gimmick humor, which sometimes overstays its welcome, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ obnoxious overacting, and with an overabundance of casual blasphemies. It seemed to me that the movie wanted to be a little smarter than its membership in the MCU would permit, though it’s certainly more engrossing than anything in Marvel’s Phases 4 or 5 (Guardians of the Galaxy 3, excepted.) 

With a 94% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, Thunderbolts* may be the best recent Marvel film, but will it be enough to right the course for Disney? Sadly, I do not think so. That company has built up too much ill will with its fan base, and there are still too many signs (the gender-swapped Silver Surfer in the upcoming The Fantastic Four, for instance) that Disney cannot or will not learn the obvious lesson: fans want the archetypal characters, not “progressive” knock-offs. Ironically, the dual aspects of Bob’s character parallel the dual manifestations of Disney’s MCU before and after Iron Man donned a gauntlet and snapped his fingers. Phases 1-3 were governed mostly by the demands of effective storytelling: solid characterization, fantastic acting, and tight plots. Since the Snap, a darkness that Disney had apparently only been keeping in check has emerged to swallow the virtues of the MCU. Thunderbolts* may not be Marvel’s salvation, but it’s a pleasant, if temporary, escape from Disney’s self-created void.