Thunderbolts Is a Craven Retread
Scrappy antiheroes strive for irrelevance
I wouldn’t say that Thunderbolts is the worst MCU film—there’s a lot of competition. But it certainly makes the case that the franchise has serial storytold its way into a dead end of formulaic irrelevance. After 20 years, the formula has atrophied, and the trumpeting of American underdogs self-actualizing has curdled. The stale jokes and tired fight scenes would be bad enough. The endless shoveling of amnesiac inspiration, though, pushes the film past tedious and on into actually offensive.
In this reiteration of the familiar tropes, a team of unlikely loser misfits stumbles on one another when their boss, CIA director Valentina (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss), tries to get them all to off each other in a remote base to protect herself from a congressional investigation. They also improbably discover a Bill-and-Ted-esque loser named Bob (Lewis Pullman) who has memory loss but is apparently the last surviving test subject of Valentina’s superhero creation program called Sentry.
The hijinks that ensue are as somnolent and pointless as that thumbnail suggests; the misfits grouse and reveal tragic backstories and then discover they are stronger together. Bob turns into an evil Superman analogue because he’s so lonely, but eventually assassin Yelena (Florence Pugh) hugs him and so his incel toxic masculine thing evaporates and all is well. (I guess that’s a spoiler, but come on.)
Like many a superhero film over the last couple decades, the touchstone here is not the current Trump administration, nor covid, nor our ongoing fascist nightmare, but 9/11 and the fear that some other superpower out there somewhere will invade us like we’ve invaded so many other places. The big battle finale involves a lot of collapsing buildings, property damage, and civilian casualties much like Avengers (2012) Man of Steel (2013), Avengers 2 (2015), and so on and so forth. There is always some overwhelmingly powerful invasion force, and always some scrappy American heroes (or sometimes heroes of other nationalities fighting under an American banner) who must band together to defeat the foe and remind us all that the United Sates, whatever its flaws, is good and will stand for justice.
Obviously, our current fascist in chief is not in fact good, hates fighting for justice, and even hates protecting children and civilians, as per the destruction of USAID. The appealingly attractive, articulate, and dedicated Valentina may unleash terror on her city, but she at least sees the worth of investing in scientific research, and more or less wants to protect the country, even if she puts protecting herself first.
Congress is presented as largely useless—but it holds actual hearings on Valentina, and even seems to be capable of maybe impeaching and removing her if it has real evidence. The film is supposed to be about the corruption and untrustworthiness of the US government. But the evil US officials on the big screen are just exponentially more competent and well-intentioned than the US officials we see lying on Fox News every day.
The film’s determination not to speak to anything actually happening in 2025 is perhaps most apparent in the treatment of Bob/Sentinel. When Bob comes into his powers his hair is dyed yellow, which makes him a visual analog for Homelander of The Boys television series. Homelander is an out and out Nazi psychopath; his sadism is inextricable from his eugenic hatred of the disabled and his contempt for immigrants, women, Black people, and other fascist targets. He’s a terrifying figure because he explicitly embodies the worst of America, including the worst of superheroes—the belief that might makes right, the Christofascist hierarchy of Americanness and power, the way that any sadism can be justified in the name of righteousness.
But while Sentry looks like Homelander, he doesn’t have any of his prototype’s depth or bite. Bob was an abused child; he’s a stoner loser; he barely remembers who he is or what he’s doing. The inevitable extended tour through his psyche doesn’t uncover any bigotry, nor even really any sign of cruelty or violence. Bob dislikes himself for not being heroic or manly enough, but even when his toxic masculinity turns to destruction, he still mostly just hates himself. He isn’t poisoned by an ideology of misogyny or racism or fascism. He’s just power hungry briefly; then he decides he shouldn’t be. End of parable.
As the half-hearted Homelander gesture suggests, the film is vaguely aware that its themes are threadbare and exhausted. Captain America doesn’t appear, but the movie is weighed down with various knock off Caps; Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), the original Captain’s sidekick; Alexei (David Harbour), product of a knock-off Soviet effort to produce their own Captain America; Walker (U.S. Agent), an unstable veteran and asshole who was injected with a latter-day version of the supersoldier formula. America’s virtue and power have taken a beating, but rather than question that virtue and power, the movie scrounges around, trying to cobble together a team of Americanness that is supposed to be cooler and scrappier because of its very half-assedness. We don’t get an honorable engagement with American failures; we get a shrug and a quip and the same old inspirational horseshit.
As a contrast close at hand, the new Superman film doesn’t just wave a flag, but actually engages with current debates on what America is and what it should be. It insists on solidarity with immigrants and on a principled opposition to American imperialism; it parodies assholes like billionaire tech ghoul Elon Musk directly. I think Superman sometimes struggles to reconcile its antifascist and anti-MAGA sentiments with the demands of a big budget action thriller, but at least it’s trying.
Thunderbolts is not trying. The movie has nothing to say and no reason for existing except that the MCU has to grind on, and some executive somewhere decided that this was the next film in the grinding process. The contrast between the courage touted in superhero films and the cowardice and timidity of the execution is hardly new. But this rag tag band has taken it to new levels of insipidity.