Among the many laudable things to be found in THUNDERBOLTS: THE NEW AVENGERS is the best exploitation of the natural consonance to be heard in the name Bob since Jim Jarmusch’s DOWN BY LAW (look it up, you won’t be sorry). In addition, what we have here is a big, splashy superhero flick that doesn’t take itself any more seriously than absolutely necessary. In keeping with the trend of skirting the shoals of camp with this genre, the heroes are imperfect souls with a ready wisecrack and varying degrees of personal issues. It’s meant to be fun, and it is, clipping along at a sprightly pace with a bit of social commentary, a solid bit of realpolitik, and an intriguing use of weaponized depression to underscore the proceedings. Best of all, if you are not entirely up on the MCU universe in all its intricacies, there is nothing here to prevent you from enjoying this jaunt to the fullest.
We begin with Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), sister of the late Red Room Black Widow, pondering the rut into which her life of espionage and assassination has devolved. In a clever bit of self-reference, she walks us through the fight that starts the film, in which she narrates the same-old, same-old of the choreography used as the protagonist, in this case Yelena, takes on the people keeping her from her goal. What is the goal? The specifics don’t matter. What the monologue that accompanies the fight proves is that even life on the edge can lose its appeal, as can the genre in which she appears, and that understanding the mechanics of scriptwriting doesn’t undermine one that is well written and clearly focused on its raison d’être.
To catch up, the original Avengers are AWOL here, and the B team is at loose ends, some, like Yelena, picking up wet work from unscrupulous CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), or in the case of her father, Alexei Shostakov, aka Red Guardian (bear-like David Harbour), running his own limo service. As it turns out, de Fontaine is more than just unscrupulous, she has plans to turn the government into her personal fiefdom by any means necessary. In one of her rare missteps, she underestimates her opposition to this in the person of Bucky Barnes aka Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), the newly elected Congressman out to impeach her, and also underestimates the other members of her wet work squad who don’t take kindly to the way she wants to terminate their employment.
There is plenty of plot here to stitch together the action sequences, and if the characters are not as fully developed as those in Anna Karenina or The Godfather, they are, nonetheless, entertaining as they quip their way through danger, and confront the unresolved issues of their pasts with credible, but not overweening, gravitas. That would be thanks to the ci-mentioned Bob (Lewis Pullman), the gawky barefoot and amnesiac stranger who is discovered by Yelena, Bucky, as well as Ava Starr aka Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and John Walker aka the second Captain America (Wyatt Russell) when they converge at Valentina’s secret facility where ghastly experiments were performed by her company The OXE Group. We will discover his superhero identity in due course, but as the gang escapes from the secret facility, odd things happen to them when they come into physical contact with Bob. They also turn his name into that also ci-mentioned mellifluous repetition that is oddly delightful.
In a delightful twist on the standard trope, the real villain here isn’t an invasion of space aliens, or a mad scientist, or even an evil genius. No, instead it’s depression and a world-weary malaise, here externalized as a black fog that envelopes New York City and turns its unwary citizens into shadows on the pavement that recall the shadows left by the victims of the Hiroshima blast. Also nonstandard are the self-doubt from which our heroes suffer, from Red Guardian’s nostalgia for public adoration, to Captain America’s inferiority complex, to Winter Soldier’s lack of confidence as he negotiates the halls of government exemplified by the word salad he spews when dealing with the press. Is it a call-out to the character Stan played in THE APPRENTICE, for which he received an Oscar™ nomination? I want to believe it is. Ghost, aside from being spunky, is sadly underwritten, a deficit for which Florence Pugh’s performance ably compensates. Dominating the story with an ironic diffidence masking the void she feels inside and the guilt she can’t reconcile, she exudes a strength and ennui in equal measure while also exhibiting a vulnerability as the weakness she despises and embraces as her last sliver of humanity.
THUNDERBOLTS: THE NEW AVENGERS once again allows the MCU to wreak havoc on New York City with wanton property damage, albeit spectacularly realized with CGI. And, as always, the door is left open for a sequel, one that I hope will allow Louis-Dreyfuss to further explore her character’s ferociously watchable flinty narcissism, and to see if her long-suffering assistant, Mel (Geraldine Viswanathan) will continue to produce the perfect cup of coffee under any circumstances and maybe find her own code of ethics.
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