I’ve been waiting a long time for this type of MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) movie. It’s certainly not the best MCU movie, but it has some soul to it, something that has been sorely lacking from every MCU movie since Avengers: Endgame. My impression is that the creators of the recent MCU movies believe the only way to entertain is to raise the stakes to ridiculous levels, as if movie-goers just want more powerful superheroes. But if a superhero has more power, then they have to face something even more powerful, so there is conflict. This turns into the positive feedback cycle: more powerful superheroes create a need for more powerful villains, and so on.

Thunderbolts* breaks that cycle and brings the power levels back down to earth, for the most part, and makes our heroes more relatable. That is the key to the enjoyment of this movie: reliability. While the superheroes in this movie are barely superheroes compared to the Avengers, they still have powers and abilities far beyond those of anyone watching this movie. Thunderbolts illustrates how superheroes are not immune to the frail human emotions that we all must deal with. Anyone who watches this movie can find at least one of the characters they can relate to, at least from some point in their life.

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Writers Make The Difference

Anytime I like the theme of a movie, I pay special attention to the writers and see what they’ve worked on before. For this movie, we have:

• Eric Pearson: Thor: Ragnarok (7.9), Black Widow (6.6), Godzilla vs. Kong (6.3), Transformers One (7.6)
• Kurt Busiek: Prior to this has written for podcasts and video games.
• Joanna Calo: The Bear (8.5), Hacks (8.2), Beef (8.0), BoJack Horseman (8.8)

Ohhhh, now I understand why this movie differs from most recent MCU movies: Joanna Calo! I’ll be honest, if I had known that she was one of the writers before seeing this movie, I would have been much more excited to see it. But I didn’t, which made the movie surprisingly good, instead of just good as expected. I can clearly see the relationship between this movie and many of the themes in BoJack Horseman.

Women Writers

Seeing that Joanna Calo was one of the writers for this movie, I decided to do a little research (BTW, all done by AI, so hopefully accurate but who knows?) I asked AI to give me the writers for every MCU movie to date and show me the male-to-female ratio. It came back with 37 male writers and 7 female writers.

Movies with at Least One Female Credited Writer:

• Guardians of the Galaxy (2014): Critic 92%, Audience 92%
• Captain Marvel (2019): Critic 80%, Audience 45%
• Black Widow (2021): Critic 79%, Audience 80%
• Eternals (2021): Critic 47%, Audience 48%
• Thor: Love and Thunder (2022): Critic 63%, Audience 77%
• The Marvels (2023): Critic 62%, Audience 84%

The average RottenTomatoes score for movies with an all-male writing crew is:

• 82% Critics
• 87% Audience

For women it’s:

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• 71% Critics
• 71% Audience *

* If we discount the 45% Audience rating for Captain Marvel which was the result of group of assholes trying to downvote a movie because of their male insecurities then the RT Audience rating jumps up to 77%. Still, not great, but better.

My personal feeling is that the brass at the MCU decided that some of these movies needed a female writer on staff because they were trying to push a narrative, and that rarely goes well. Some of the worst movies I’ve seen this decade were the result of someone trying to push a narrative about women or pick your minority group. What we usually end up with is a movie that is an embarrassment to the very people and issues that were illustrated. Believe me when I tell you, Thunderbolts doesn’t try to push a narrative, other than to say that even super-heroes are human and must contend with the same emotional frailty we all do.

Acting

The acting in most superhero movies is often lacking because the actors don’t have much to work with. That’s not the case with Thunderbolts. Florence Pugh, as Yelena, is great. Her character has the most material to work with, and she does a really good job with it.

There’s also Lewis Pullman as Bob/Robert. He was pretty solid. Note, he’s also the son of Bill Pullman. I thought it seemed familiar. I can totally see his father in his mannerisms.

David Harbour does a great job with Alexei/Red Guardian, but I find it annoying that the character is written to be a little stupid sometimes. I get it, there are people like this, but maybe they could pull back just a little on Alexei’s lack of intelligence and make him more self-aware. But maybe that’s just me.

I feel that Sebastian Stan was forgotten in this role. His character is amazingly unexpressive, and that’s getting old. He’s too good an actor to be given the cardboard character he portrays.

Wyatt Russell deserves some mention for his work on John Walker. He isn’t the main character, but his character does evolve over the span of the movie and he shows that well, but keeps it subtle so that he doesn’t take away from the spotlight that’s on Yelina.

With consistently good acting like this, the director, Jake Schreier, deserves a shout-out for a job well done. He also worked on the TV show Beef with writer Joanna Calo. I’m curious if he got the job because of her, or she got the job because of him. Either way, they make a good team.

Grade: A-

About The Peetimes: I have three Peetimes. The first two are really good. The last one is a long emotional scene that should only be used as emergencies.

There are extra scenes during, or after, the end credits of Thunderbolts*.

Plot
After finding themselves ensnared in a death trap, an unconventional team of antiheroes must embark on a dangerous mission that will force them to confront the darkest corners of their pasts.