Why You Ran Out of Whelms for … Thunderbolts*

There‘s an old joke: why did you hit yourself in the head so many times? Answer: because it feels so good when you stop. The MCU has been in self-harm mode for so many years it‘s not funny anymore, but it doesn’t seem to be able to stop.

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This relentless self-inflicted pain has left audiences, including my friends and me, utterly worn out by the endless, substance-free spectacle of the MCU. We’re tired, boss. It’s a little like eating candy floss. It looks impressive: a giant pink swirl of sugary goodness. But after ‘eating’ one of the more recent movies, it’s just like candy floss: all air, and once it’s done, it leaves you with ennui and diabetes.

It’s not that candy floss is evil. As a child, it was a force of nature, a theme park staple. But now as an adult, you just walk on by. It doesn’t overwhelm or underwhelm. Like the MCU movies of late, you’ve just stopped caring.

Thunderbolts* was supposed to be the grounded film that brought us back home again. Spoilers: it is not.

The Promise and the Whelmed Illusion

There’s a certain level of exhaustion we get when seeing CGI-fest flicks where cosmic threats are merely punched aside by higher-power heroes. The MCU has painted itself into a corner with an ever-escalating power scale. When an Avengers-level threat arrives, it doesn’t always feel that threatening. It’s now got to contend with gods and magic hammers. Hell, they needed the McGuffin of the Infinity Stones to make us think the Avengers could even bleed; by pitting the very human Tony Stark and Natasha Romanoff against Thanos, the good guys needed to step up their nuclear armament programme by literally pulling in players from a different timeline’s bench.

The problem is that when there are ever-more-powerful bad guys, you need ever-more-powerful good guys. When the movies become power-based dick-waving contests, there are no real stakes anymore. When we bring heroes back from the dead or turn villains into good guys, audiences switched off.

In the superhero genre, there is a thing called a street-level hero. This term defines both the hero themselves, perhaps without magic powers or super strength, but also the foes they fight. They can be gangs, kingpins, or corporations, but they’re foes you can face. DC’s Bat family are street-level heroes; Bruce Wayne’s rich, but otherwise he’s just some guy with a radical set of motivations. Whether you prefer street-level conflicts is not the point; what street-level superheroes provide a writing team are crucial constraints. You can’t magic away the bad guy! You need to go through a hero’s journey, reach the other side, and become a better person. The sacrifices are the point.

The promise of Thunderbolts* was more street-level goodness. The squad is Yelena, ‘sister’ of the infamous—and now dead—Black Widow. Her ‘father’, Alexei—the Red Guardian—is a sort of Soviet dollar-store knockoff of Captain America. Bucky, AKA the Winter Soldier, is a man with more PTSD than superpowers. His big claim to fame is a super-strong arm that somehow doesn’t tear from his shoulder, perhaps because he suckled on the super-serum teat as a part of the Winter Soldier Programme. There’s John Walker, the Asshole Edition™ of Steve Rogers, and Ava Starr—Ghost, someone who can phase through walls but is otherwise fairly normal.

This is supposed to be a more grounded group, facing a villain while burdened with their very real human issues. We were promised a plucky group of heroes who were far from perfect, an entire squad of Black Widows, people so tarnished they could never be buffed out. It felt like we might be getting a ‘real’ story again, without the CGI eyeball fuck that the prior movies turned into, but crucially, with a more down-to-earth story.

We were lied to. This initial feeling of relief is an illusion, as the film ultimately fails to deliver on this promise, not least because the main villain—Sentry—makes Thanos look like an extra in Barney and Friends.

The Muddled Identity Crisis

Let’s start by restating the central problem of the film‘s identity. At least part of it is that Thunderbolts* doesn‘t know whether it‘s about Avengers-level threats or street-level heroes.

With parts of the cast notably not superpowered (Yelena, arguably the main protagonist, is just like her older sister: well-trained but terribly human), but with the enemy being a cosmic force (Bob’s Sentry), it feels like Marvel isn’t confident that the stakes of a street-level conflict will pull audiences in.

This fundamental disconnect between the team and their foe leads directly to what I call the Joker-level missed opportunity. By mixing Sentry with a group of scrubs, the film robs itself of a more interesting villain, and by extension, a more interesting narrative. It’s not that Robert Reynolds is poor fuel for villainy; his tortured, drifter past filled with drug use and bad parenting is fertile ground for a man to turn to evil. It’s that Bob goes from likeable-yet-confused to a cosmic threat in less than 24 hours. He turns from someone we want to help—a dopey wreck, a man who can’t stand up straight—into an unstoppable god, all with the barest hint of training. This robs us of any believability in the inherent villainous threat; it‘s comedic, not serious.

But if we‘d flipped the bit and had a Joker-level antagonist, a person who was actually tempted by evil rather than misunderstood, but had limitations rather than godlike powers, we could have explored more of the backstory and mental tapestry of our street-level heroes. There could have been a redemption arc worthy of the telling, but sadly, no: Bob’s fall is a stumble, and his redemption… well, we’ll get to that Kodak moment shortly.

The MCU’s core mistake is made in the boardroom, demanding a content churn of movies and subsequent revenue. What makes people heroes is striving for heroism rather than attaining it. Striving means a willingness to sacrifice. Heroes aren’t heroic because they can fly or are bulletproof, and the MCU continues to miss this nuance by putting people in the Octagon against monstrously overpowered enemies. We don‘t get character exploration; instead, screenwriters are forced to convolute themselves out of crisis after crisis by any means necessary, a clear symptom of the MCU’s creative stagnation.

The Failure of Character Arcs

There’s an old piece of writing advice I’m sure you’ve heard before: show, don’t tell. If we hear about it, it’s a documentary. If we live through it, we become part of the journey. This fundamental failure to ‘show, don‘t tell’ is highlighted in Yelena Belova‘s supposed character arc. Thunderbolts*’ initial opening stanza tries to present Yelena as a tortured soul, but we‘re not quite sure if we can buy it. She’s too competent, too cocky despite her Blade Runner-esque noir voiceover. Yelena is too damn comfortable being the Black Widow’s replacement for us to believe she’s having a crisis.

It’s because of this voiceover: it’s telling us she’s sad, but we don’t get to see her being troubled by it.

This mistake is replicated throughout the movie. Another one? There‘s a moment in a flashback where she sees herself as a child doing something horrible. She chooses to run from this initially, then confront it, but at no time does she take the crucial step her father Alexei hints at: forgiving herself. His perspective is that she was a child—totally fair!—and that she was judging herself by an adult’s standards, rather than judging those who put her there.

Imagine if her moment of earned catharsis was to forgive herself, as Alexei suggests. She doesn‘t need guns or martial arts for that, merely recognition that she‘s on a path and now more in charge of her destiny than her previous masters ever were. Yelena never has this moment, instead stumbling from being aware of others to being unaware of herself, all while we in the audience are told she’s working on her shit.

She’s not alone in this. All characters move through their arc by talking it out. Walker becomes less of an asshole by talking about being an asshole. Ghost becomes less of an asshole by talking about being an asshole. Alexei… well, you get the idea.

Back to Yelena: we’re told she wanted to be the goalie, the person other people could rely on when they made mistakes. As a precursor to a heroic act, it‘s a good setup, but the film then presents this telling as the actual heroic act. Yelena has no goalie moment in the movie. She‘s not in charge. We‘re supposed to believe that years of institutional trauma are magic’d away by one conversation between her and Alexei, and at no time do we really see Yelena doing what Captain America would do: rousing the team or being the person who is injured in the line of duty. It‘s theatre, not action.

We’re told, not shown.

This is further let down by characters who could have supported this journey being squandered. David Harbour’s Red Whatever is consigned to slapstick comic relief. Harbour has range and gravitas—he’s been a caring father in Stranger Things. He’s been the tortured soul of Hellboy. Here, he’s all caricature instead of being better used to support Yelena’s journey.

The problem with this is that we can’t take his messages seriously. Alexei Shostakov was the man Soviet Russia hung its hopes on, and yet we’re supposed to believe he’s a semi-incompetent buffoon who has cringe dad moments? It robs the found-family message of its importance. His character could have had a better arc; he‘s never been a complicated man and just wants to have the family he never could. However, Alexei as comic relief starves this necessary found-family message of much of its momentum.

The wasted potential doesn’t stop there. Bucky Barnes smells exactly like trauma, but we see no notable redemption arc here. For sure, Bucky’s probably done enough redemption already, but in Thunderbolts* all he is is a life-support system for a superpowered arm. He’s too easily convinced that a group of malcontents wants to help, going from their captor to an accomplice in 3.2 nanoseconds.

But the real crime scene here—the most squandered of all potentials—is Ghost. While Florence Pugh is brilliant as Yelena Belova, we already know what a Black Widow looks like. This suggests the most interesting character of the lot is potentially Hannah John-Kamen‘s Ava Starr, a tortured hero with a tortured past who remains… tortured. There could have been such promise between Yelena and Ava, where they started off in conflict, became frenemies, then earned some trust. While this is hinted at, the payload is left on the runway.

The insults to Ghost continue. She is quite powerful with her ability to phase through things, and we can’t have that with street-level heroes. So, basically, the movie just sidelines this ability through villains using a Walmart ghetto blaster, the sound from which stops her from using those abilities. It’s ridiculous that her main move is so easily defeated, rendering her entire powerset to that of an also-ran.

The hard fails of both moments means a truly tragic antihero (Ghost) loses both her narrative and superpowered punches, leaving poor Hannah John-Kamen to try and act as a tortured antihero with no goddamn lines to back it up.

The Catharsis-Free Ending: No Calories, No Flavour

The movie ends with a hug-it-out resolution. I’m not being coy here; there’s an actual hug moment. The reason we’re left here by the writers is because, ref: point A, we‘ve got a villain so powerful we can‘t actually do anything about it, so we‘re left with some variant of love/friendship conquering all.

The largest problem here, beyond the sheer absurdity, is that it’s utterly nonsensical.

It’s a Kodak, or I guess Disney, moment where we’re supposed to believe that if we‘d only used our words to communicate then we could have avoided all this fuss. It is unexplained how Sentry’s dark half is overcome by this. It is unexplained how characters like Walker find their way past their inner asshole. They just hug, and the world is saved—there‘s no earning of this resolution, and the resolution itself is confusing and trite. It‘s a, “What the fuck just happened?” moment.

This is compounded by De Fontaine‘s unearned victory. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is actually fine as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, a charming reptile motivated by her own ends, and we can‘t help but hope she falls on her face. But because the story needs to service an ongoing MCU, we‘re not allowed the catharsis that de Fontaine‘s true fall would bring.

The Thunderbolts (now the New Avengers) want to kill her for all she‘s done… but they don’t get the chance because suddenly they‘re on camera, with de Fontaine crowing about how she‘s ‘created’ these New Avengers. It‘s complete nonsense, especially because de Fontaine is under investigation for creating secret weapons in the first place. There were at least a thousand other, better endings, but none of them would have kept de Fontaine alive and active in the MCU, to reappear as sequel fodder later.

Instead, Yelena has one little line: “We own you now.” We’re expected to believe the Thunderbolts are in control? Absolute nonsense.

It’s an abject illusion of heroism. Our ending leaves us soured rather than satisfied, without our heroes having done anything really hero-worthy to gain the citizen adoration they get at the end. See, no one sees them do much fighting against Sentry—we only see them go into the despairing void, before reemerging to appear on camera.

It avoids any evidence of what just happened. There are no actions for the public to adore because no one saw anything—it all happened in a dark void. We’re simply told, not shown, that they’re now the New Avengers, and the people of Earth adore them because we’re told they adore them. It‘s Endgame all over again, where people who ‘died’ to Sentry’s powers just pop right back out as if nothing happened.

More Service, Less Story

While I can appreciate that this is a rare MCU movie where we didn‘t have an alternate timeline or other bullshit allowing instant villain-to-hero conversions or for heroes to avoid death, it doesn‘t feel like a story of much earned consequence. It’s a manifesto of people having camera moments about the horrible things they‘ve done, without some of the punch-the-sky moments earlier MCU movies managed to deliver.

If I were to try giving MCU writers a message, it would be that there should be consequences, and they should matter. Nothing in Thunderbolts*—from the villain, to the hero arcs, and to the action—has any consequence or risk. It’s the same Marvel, confused about what movies it‘s trying to make, all over again. And it‘s a shame: for a company with so many great comics about actual sacrifice, they miss the boat all the time in their latest movies.

There needs to be more service to the story and less service to ‘the MCU’ and continually cranking out the next 27 movies. Guys, we‘re bored.

What did you think of Thunderbolts*? Let me know in the comments below. And if you’d like to see a new MCU movie with consequences… well, I’m not sure I can help, but click Like anyway. And thanks for watching!