In Thunderbolts (The New Avengers), CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, facing impeachment, assembles a team of antiheroes—Yelena Belova, John Walker, Ghost, and Taskmaster—and sends them to a remote compound. There, they’re ambushed in a deadly trap designed to eliminate them. With help from Alexei Shostakov, who dubs them the “Thunderbolts,” they escape and join forces with Bucky Barnes to confront de Fontaine. However, their mission uncovers the existence of Bob, a powerful superhuman known as Sentry, whose dark alter ego, the Void, poses a catastrophic threat to New York City.

Thunderbolts (The New Avengers) Review

As a sad and tired looking Bucky Barns gets savagely beaten with his own arm by a clinically depressed meth addict who can only be stopped by getting in touch with his feelings, while tertiary MCU female characters belittle their loser male counterparts, audiences will ask themselves, “why is Thunderbolts?”

With disasters like The Marvels and Captain America: Brave New World still fresh in our collective minds, by comparison, moments of Thunderbolts are a breath of fresh air, while others are stark reminders of how far the franchise has fallen. David Harbour’s Red Guardian is one thing the film gets right. He’s big and bold and having far too much fun for such a melancholy movie, but his shining optimism, childish though it may be, will be the only thing keeping audience members from contemplating the business end of a revolver during Thunderbolts’ more than two hours of loneliness and depression.

Thunderbolts is a bit of a misnomer (but not as much as The New Avengers), as the film is a Yelena Belova movie with other characters in it. Even fan-favorite Bucky Barnes is more or less an afterthought. If you don’t know who Yelena is, it’s the Florence Pugh character that the MCU is desperate to have fill ScarJo’s leather catsuit. And while Florence Pugh is an exceptional actress, she ain’t filling that thing out. In any case, no amount of talent or even a pinup figure would make her itty bitty parkour, kung fu character make sense in a universe that also has Celestials.

That aside, structurally, the film is messy. It’s bloated with two-dimensional characters who all serve more or less the same narrative purpose, and it doesn’t know what to do with those who are on an adventure that doesn’t feel natural. The action set-pieces don’t make sense, especially when the group confronts Sentry. After unloading magazines (plural) of 50-caliber rounds and super-soldier roundhouses without budging the golden-maned schizophrenic, the ragtag group of street-level heroes literally take their knives to a Superman fight. Worse than that, the fight goes on forever. But hey, they do manage to throw out snarky one-liners like rounds from a Gatling gun. That’s pretty much the formula throughout.

The action is unimaginative, the characters are forgettable, and the plot is little more than a commercial for the next MCU product. Thunderbolts is a culmination of some of the MCU’s worst instincts bolstered by a couple of really talented performers and first-rate special effects, but otherwise, it is a complete waste, and it seems to know it. I don’t want to spoil the post-credit scene, but it acknowledges all of this and perfectly encapsulates what I was feeling by the film’s end.

If you’re desperate for a big-budget special effects superhero movie and are in a forgiving mood, maybe Thunderbolts will do it for you. But The Accountant 2 is still out there, and it’s a lot more fun than this.

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