3 Short Paragraphs (Probably Not): Thunderbolts*

2025, Jake Schreier (Beef) -- download

Definitely not.

Stubbing (more like preambling) this before I forget it, because if the few readers out there have happened to notice, I have been slowing down of late. This is not my 3265th Hiatus just a very real state of change going on in my life, some very real person shit that, despite my usual habit of blathering on about all my personal baggage, I will not be getting into here. Kent knows. That will suffice. But it has impacted how I write, impacted how I think, impacted how I watch; the latter primarily in that I have a new Life Schedule right now, and that doesn't often include sitting by myself watching movies. Oh, a lot of TV is being watched, but, y'know, despite that brief experiment, still not interested in writing about TV.

OK, that's out of the way.

I did not, in fact, get out to see this in the cinema, as I hoped to. I did not, in fact, outrageously enjoy this, as I expected to do. It had not been hope; I had been convinced this movie would be right down my alley, and yet... it was just OK. 

In some ways, it is fair to call this movie, "Marvel's Suicide Squad." It is a movie about the MCU anti-heroes, at best, or villains, to a degree. It is a movie about the Bad Guys being re-tooled into being the heroes and, spoiling something that attempted to stay hidden for quite some time, into being The New Avengers. Except, almost the entirety of that revelation is buried behind a "14 months later" coda. But yeah, for the first time, DC flipped the table on Marvel and still retains the better of the two executions of an idea.

I will let Kent "we disagree" on that note, cuz he probably knows the real comic book Thunderbolts and can explain in educated details how I am wrong. But he probably won't; he's far too gracious with my foot-in-mouth syndrome.

Luckily, this movie starred my favourite character and portrayal of a character in MCU-dom -- Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh, Oppenheimer), of Black Widow and Hawkeye fame. Like her sister Natasha Romanov, or Black Widow, she was raised in the Red Room, a secretive Russian agency that trained assassins from childhood. Unlike her sister, she hadn't escaped of her own volition, and not until the circumstances of said movie. And even after she has escaped, and the Red Room has fallen (quite literally), she remains what she was ... a quippy, snarky, violent killer. And that leads her right into the hands of CIA director  Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julie Louis-Dreyfus, Enough Said), who kind of presents as the less than savoury Nick Fury, as de Fontaine continues to use Yelena for her wetwork skills. And that work eats away an Yelena's soul.

When the movie begins, Yelena professes a desire to leave de Fontaine's employ and is sent to a top secret mountain base to kill someone who wants to steal from de Fontaine. Note to bunker builders, if you want to make a top secret base with an even more secret room "a mile below the bunker", don't start on top of a mountain. It just seems... flagrant. Anywayz, Yelena is attacked before she can stop said thief and ... well, we catch on pretty quick. A was sent to kill B, B was sent to kill C, C was sent to kill... well, you get the idea. The alphabet squad includes: John Walker (Wyatt Russell, Overlord), the Asshole Captain America, Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen, Killjoys) or Ghost, the villain from the Ant-Man movie, and Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko, Quantum of Solace), or Taskmaster from the Black Widow movie, another pawn of the Red Room. They all punch, shoot and stab the other, all playing "I am not here for you, just them" game, with Yelena catching on almost as quick as we, the viewer, does. But before she can halt everyone, Ghost shoots Taskmaster in the head.

Wait, what? Yes, like the opening sequence of Gunn's The Suicide Squad, we start by killing off one of who we assume is the main characters. Its a shock, and frankly, I didn't like it. It was there for only shock value, but also to drive home that all these characters are amoral, cuz nobody mourns her, even when they realize her death, and the possibility of them all dying, was de Fontaine's plan all along -- insert evil cackle.

De Fontaine. She's been a villain-in-waiting for a few movies and TV shows. Unlike Thanos, they have been spreading her thin on the toast for some time now. But Marvel had a lot of loafs of villain in the oven over the past 10+ years, many of which just fell flat. If anything, that is more adherent to the comics where there are tons of villains and supervillains and inbetweeners. Not sure I believe it works in Cinematic Universe-dom. I don't like her as a character (you are not supposed to), and I don't like her as a plot device. To be honest, I kept on expecting her to become a Hydra-lite villain as the character always struck me as a riff on "GI Joe" character, Baroness. But I am not a big Joe fan, so I will once again let Kent talk that one through. At least here, in this movie, other people have noticed her being nefarious and have her up for impeachment, in front of a Senate Hearing. I just wish Real Life hadn't shown us how weak-kneed those hearings are, but still, the whole movie hinges on her scrambling to eliminate any evidence the Senators can use against her.

In much the way the original Avengers movie was supposed to established the assembling of the team because of a specific event, this movie uses the emergence of The Void (Lewis Pullman, Salem's Lot) in NYC as an opportunity for de Fontaine's original plan to actually be given light, despite her mishandling of it. She has literally caused the event that allowed her to use The New Avengers to stop. If she had perhaps intended on that happening, I would have enjoyed her character more, but no, its unintended consequences, leaving her more as comic-relief than supervillain.

If anything saved the movie for me, let me return to my opening comments on Yelena Belova. As Kent says, this movie is her movie. She's the only one playing a real character, and everyone else (maybe Bob to a lesser degree) is there to be either support, or comic relief, to her part in the story. She's deep in the shade of gray of moral behaviour, but unlike others, she knows she's there and... well, regrets it. But she also knows nothing else. She cannot pretend, like her "father" (David Harbour, Hellboy) does, and see herself as ever having been a hero, or becoming one. But she has her sister as a template, a statement of potentiality. Her heroic acts throughout the movie are not the "stop the rock from crushing the little girl" style, but more the being able to step out of her own way and attempt to help Bob. She sees a mirror in him being manipulated by an agency who doesn't care who they hurt in order to accomplish their goals. So, when everyone else wants to shoot or smash their way into stopping The Void, she sees, again, her sister as the template and tries sacrifice. Its not the most mentally healthy of choices, but its... something in the right direction.

Exceeept, de Fontaine is able to step in and pull her "this was my plan all along" out of her ass, and everyone, Yelena included, tags along. They become The New Avengers, for better or for worse. The coda introduces them "14 months later" dealing with the emergence of Sam's own version of The Avengers, which I hope they handle well, but I don't have much actual faith they will. Considering how Ironheart ended, RiRi is more likely to join de Fontaine's team than go anywhere actually heroic.

So, again, it was alright. I enjoyed myself, I like the quipping and the action was well done. But I wasn't all-in, I wasn't satisfied. Is it me? Will I enjoy more in re-watches? Probably, to both.

Kent's post from 10,000 years ago. I agree with everything he said, but he liked it way more than I did.