I was honestly looking forward to Thunderbolts. Everyone seemed to like it, it was getting good reviews, and things were looking up for Marvel. Hooray, some good news. It’s now on VoD, so I gave it a shot, and… oh…
You know the cast, Florence Pugh, Hopper from Stranger Things, and more. So Drunken Yoda and I took a crack at it together as a tag-team event.
The Story
Boba Phil: Thunderbolts is the Avengers if you made all the protagonists dull, un-super, and uninteresting.
After finding themselves ensnared in a death trap, an unconventional team of antiheroes must go on a dangerous mission that will force them to confront the darkest corners of their pasts.
I forgot most of what happened in Black Widow. I do remember it was not very good, hence why I don’t remember it. We now join Yelena (Pugh), the poor man’s Black Widow. She’s a stroppy teenager who hates her job, which involves tidying up Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Louis-Dreyfus).
I think Valentina appears at the end of Black Widow, don’t know, don’t care. Anyway, she’s now the bad guy in all this, I think. She’s been running an organization that no one has mentioned until now. The organization, OXE, runs black ops, and Black Widow if you ordered from Temu cleans up.
Yelena is bored of hiding the shadows and wants to go public and be a superhero. Valentina tells her one last mission, and then she’ll go public. The mission is to get into an OXE vault, find out what someone wants to steal, and kill them.
Long story short, Yelena, Ava Starr/Ghost (John-Kamen), and John Walker / US Agent (Russell) all end up in the vault. They are there to kill each other, and to be killed even more by Valentina. She’s going to kill them by putting them in an easily escapable situation with a 2-minute warning.
Drunken Yoda: I think you’re being overly harsh. Yelena’s issues don’t depend on you watching Black Widow, and thank God for that! But I will say that the “trap” they found themselves in was very conveniently set up with being able to disable it with just having the power source in the room with them. And why a timer? All the time with the timers. Just send in the flames!
Still, once they get out and go on the run, it’s a nice little movie about them trying to deal with their various issues and problems.
What About Bob?
Boba Phil: In the chaos, we meet Bob (Pullman), who doesn’t know how he got into the vault. Anyways, they all manage to escape, or the movie would be over. They make the stupidest escape in superhero history. Valentina is waiting at the top, and they need to escape.
Bob lays down his life to help the Thunderbolts escape. However, Bob doesn’t die; it turns out he’s Deadpool, with all the powers of everyone, which is triggered by trauma. The Thunderbolts end up in the middle of the desert. How do they escape?
The Red Baron (Harbour) is the limo driver who drives around Valentina and her assistant. The good thing is that the two of them discuss all their secret plans in front of him. Lucky that. Anyways, he drives to the rough area where they are and finds them, just like in real life.
When they escape, Bucky (Stan) is supposed to kill them, but instead he becomes one of the team. He’s a congressman now. I wish my local politician was the Winter Soldier.
Drunken Yoda: When you say “Deadpool” you mean the bad one from 2009? Sentry is a weird character to me, shoehorned into the Marvel universe with a nice little one-off story, but really it was a mistake not to just kill him and be done with it. Having someone that powerful in the universe was a mistake.
Bob The Bad Guy – *Mild Spoilers*
Boba Phil: Bob is taken by Valentina, and she convinces him to become evil. Bob is evil now. Evil Bob. He turns into the Sentry and is going to kill the Thunderbolts. He is a Deadpool and unbeatable, and this is where the story fails.
See, Bob doesn’t kill people, he sends them to a void somewhere. We can’t have any serious stakes anymore, and people dying is depressing. You can guess what happens; the power of friendship saves the day.
Bob becomes Gollum and Smeagol, good and bad in both of them. Yelena helps Bob see the light, fight the darkness, and save everyone. The good thing is, Bob now can’t be Sentry anymore, as he can’t control it, which will make for another exciting movie.
Drunken Yoda: I’ll admit he was ridiculously powerful, but that was the point. What I didn’t get is how the team thought they had a chance when it was pretty obvious early on they were totally outclassed.
The Cast
Boba Phil: I like most of the cast, they are all good. I’ve been a fan of Pugh from her pre-fame days. The problem is that Yelena is a boring, miserable cow! I get it, she’s bored with her job, but cracking a smile won’t break your face, love.
Seeing Bucky as a congressman is like seeing Sydney Sweeney with her clothes on. At least he had something to do in the last 30 minutes.
I’m a big fan of John-Kamen. She’s very good. However, if her character wasn’t in this movie, it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference. She had nothing to do, served no purpose, apart from opening a door. A complete waste.
Drunken Yoda: I think the cast is what made this reasonably enjoyable to me. They were all likeable and some, like John Walker, were far more interesting than they were in their various movie or streaming introductions. Florence Pugh is a talented actress, David Harbour is really chewing the scenery, and Sebastian Stan is always reliable as Bucky. Lewis Pullman is genuinely sympathetic. Julia Louise Dreyfuss is too Elaine to be taken seriously as a CIA head, though. Wyatt Russel adds some pathos to US Agent. But the rest really barely register, I’m afraid.
The Main Issues
Boba Phil: The biggest issues with Thunderbolts is the script. They lean into the jokes, hard, in fact, so hard it’s a distraction. There is more humour than in a James Gunn movie. Honestly, almost every scene has a joke in it.
I kept thinking that if they spent as much time on the story as they did on the jokes, this would have been an awesome movie!
The entire ending of the movie is just stupid when Bob turns to the dark side. He and Yelena had formed a bond, and she helped him out. Instead of the ‘one-shot awesome fight’ they could have gone straight to her talking to him. I just shaved 20 minutes off the movie and about $50 million off the CG budget.
While I’m talking about Bob, Valentina says he is unbeatable. The Thunderbolts, the reject Avengers, don’t stand a chance. He would have killed them, but we need 1. a kickass fight scene and 2. to deal with depression.
I know people were hailing the dealing with depression as a triumph, but seriously, I don’t need to deal with that. I have bipolar, and I have had it for about 20 years. I watch movies to escape reality, not to be reminded of it. If I wanted to watch a movie with that kind of thing, I’d put on a Ken Loach movie.
There was no way out of them having to deal with Bob. They couldn’t defeat him with fighting, so they beat him with love and friendship. Give me a bucket.
Drunken Yoda: Nothing like a group hug to save the world. For whatever reason, the jokes didn’t grate on me in this one. At least when they needed to be serious, they didn’t undercut themselves with a cheap joke.
Overall
Boba Phil: Thunderbolts is not a triumph, it’s not the best thing since Endgame, it’s just more content. Laugh at the silly jokes, look at the cool action, and learn to deal with depression with friends.
Chuck in the fact that Yelena isn’t ‘super’, but she can take out a bunch of men, twice her size, quicker than I can take out a bag of chips. Girl bosses are so last year. The fact that she’s depressed for most of the movie makes her so much more appealing.
Thunderbolts was just bad, so bad that Mrs Boba Phil said she liked it. I’m pretty sure ‘liking bad movies’ is grounds for divorce.
It’s dull, boring, and the jokes don’t land. I’m really annoyed, as I was really looking forward to this. I will say, I did recently watch Age of Ultron, Civil War, and Spider-Man: Homecoming. That was all peak Marvel, the Thunderbolts is not.
It gets half a star out of 5, just for the sake that it shut the wife up for 2 hours, but it’s not worth seeing.
Drunken Yoda: While I wouldn’t rank it with the glory days of the MCU, it certainly was a reasonably entertaining 2 hours. Not 2 and half or 3 hours, which was nice. The characters were reasonably compelling and the script made perfect sense to me. Did I like the focus on basically “you should get therapy” theme? Not really. But all in all, it’s a heckuva lot better than the crap they’ve been churning out over the last 5 years.
Boba Phil’s Rating:
Drunken Yoda’s Rating:
