Look! Up in the sky!: The happy gang from ‘Thunderbolts’.
THUNDERBOLTS ***1/2 (126 minutes) PG
Painful experience has taught us all to regard the release of each new Marvel epic with deep suspicion.
If Forrest Gump had been a motion picture reviewer he would have described the output of the Marvel Studios assembly line as a box of chocolates, never knowing what you’re going to get – something good, something mediocre or some godawful mess that redefines how a $250 million production budget can produce a dollop of mass-market mulch all memory of which evaporates before you hit the exits.
Praise be to the Movie God, then, that Thunderbolts is top-shelf Marvel – a surprisingly strong, surprise-filled character-driven superhero lark with lots of action that is actually fun, a quality missing from so much of the recent slate.
The premise focuses on the formation of a new superhero team, the Russian gang from 2021’s Black Widow: Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh and her fruity accent), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and gag-loving father figure Red Guardian (David Harbour).
Considered a B-team in the Marvel stable, they’ve been elevated in superhero standing by Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) in response to the secret plans of wisenheimer CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus; Veep; forever Elaine from Seinfeld).
Looking and sounding like US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard (the white streak says it’s no accident), Valentina has spent billions of taxpayer dollars on resources that will allow her to make her own superheroes, thank you very much.
The subject of her grand design is Bob (Lewis Pullman, son of Bill; memorable in the TV version of Catch 22), a lowly sap with an unassuming presence who slowly moves centre-frame as the film’s main character story builds and builds.
Although there are spurts of the frenetic cutting that has regrettably become a Marvel signature, director Jake Schreier and his team have worked hard to give the action sequences some visual edge, using overhead camera angles, slow-motion and sustained shots delivering fights, crashes, assorted battles and twirling vehicles with above-par aplomb.
Kudos, too, to Pugh for proving so adept at close quarters combat and for being the stone-faced anchor to all the shenanigans. The last thing we saw her in was the cancer drama We Live in Time, which did not involve her roundhouse-kicking anybody. Talk about range.
With more to come – would any Marvel film dare end without an end-craft teaser? – one hopes this branch of the franchise does not contract the sequelitis that has infected all the others and continues to deliver something relatively fresh and decidedly fun.