Thunderbolts*

Thunderbolts* has some cool ideas. It’s pretty concise in scope, even as a team-up movie. It has some clever espionage set-up that it delivers on with an entertaining swagger, well-choreographed fights, and pretty poignant themes about not giving in to the abyss of one’s lifelong trauma. But it also indulges in the trademark Marvel smarminess in such an unrelenting fashion that I have trouble taking the film at face value. It so often follows up moments of vulnerability that highlight the “power of friendship” by retreating behind walls of insincerity that it’s ultimately disorienting, leaving you unsure if we’re meant to see any of it as genuine or view the whole thing as one big, elaborate bit. Still, Florence Pugh is a delight, and when it’s her movie, it’s great. Unfortunately, though, Bucky and everyone else are basically just along for the ride, swept up in the story’s momentum rather than having any real influence on it themselves. For a movie about a bunch of characters claiming to want to find new lives for themselves outside of the trenches of merc work, it’s disappointing that you never get the sense any of them are actually in control of their own destiny. — Kenneth Shepard