BEFORE: It's a rare treat when I get to sit in a movie theater and, you know, WATCH a movie - these days more often than not I'm working in a theater and making sure that other people are having a good experience. Right now that's a bunch of students at an arts college, and the college pairs up with a guild of visual effects people to give them a theater to watch current VFX-based movies in, and in exchange, a bunch of students who maybe can't afford to pay almost $20 for a first-run movie ticket get to see those movies too. And if I'm not working the shift (as I was for "Captain America: Brave New World") then I can kind of sneak in and watch the movie, too. Hey, it's good to know people. This might be a bit easier if I had a staff ID, but almost four years in, I'm technically still a temp worker, but I'm kind of trying to work on that. I'll keep you posted, but in the meantime, I've got a FREE current Marvel movie to watch.
If I've done this right, Disney+ should be streaming my lead-in, and Sebastian Stan carries over from "Captain America: Brave New World".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Black Widow" (Movie #3,915)
THE PLOT: After finding themselves ensnared in a death trap, an unconventional team of anti-heroes must go on a dangerous mission that will force them to confront the darkest corners of their pasts.
AFTER: You might have noticed the asterisk on the poster, Marvel's playing a little fast and loose with the rules on this one - we've all agreed that you can't just change the name of a movie while it's playing in theaters, there's this thing called marketplace confusion. But movies do it all the time, they mess up and they realize that a title like "The Expend4bles" is really stupid, so by the time the film plays on cable some systems are rightfully calling it "Expendables 4" but some other cable systems didn't get the memo, and now half the fans out there who want to watch it don't know how to search for it on their DVR. Don't even get me started on the "Fast and the Furious" franchise and all the cutesy ways they tried to work numbers into their movie titles. Or the Divergent franchise, which couldn't decide if the third film in the series should be titled "Allegiant" or "The Divergent Series: Allegiant". Yes, the second one has proper branding but the first one is easier to use, but my point is that despite what the focus group thinks, the studio needs to pick ONE of these and stick with it.
The MCU has been building up to "Thunderbolts" for a while now, if you've stayed seated after the credits and paid attention to what's been going on, the cast-off heroes have been recruited for a new team, or that's what we've been led to believe. A character named Valentina Allegra de Fontaine appeared in "Black Panther 2" and was revealed to be the ex-wife of CIA agent Everett Ross, though I think in the comic books she was a top SHIELD agent and the on-again, off-again girlfriend/enemy of Nick Fury (Not the black Nick Fury, the old white one who fought in WW2 with Captain America and the Howling Commandos. I know, it's complicated.). Anyway, Valentina popped up at the end of "Black Widow" to recruit Yelena, and then at the end of "The Falcon and the Winter Solider" to recruit John Walker, the stand-in Captain America. It sure seemed like a team was being put together, as she was collecting each movie's cast-off, and then when "Thunderbolts" was announced, it all started to make sense, she's assembling that team for her own little anti-Avengers, and I'm here for it.
There have been maybe four or five Thunderbolts teams in the comic-book universe, the first was a group of heroes who appeared on the scene when the Avengers were presumed dead, but they were really old villains who were disguised as new heroes, led by a mastermind named Baron Zemo. Sharp-eyed comic-book users noticed that their powers bore strong resemblances to certain villains who hadn't been seen in a while, but most fans were shocked when the new "heroes" turned out to be anything but. Something odd happened to that group of villains, some of them actually became complex, somewhat likable characters over time, but you know, every comic book run ends at some point. The Thunderbolts came back with a second roster, and a third, with Avenger Hawkeye sometimes leading a team of other reformed villains.
A few years later, Marvel tried the same scam again with a new team, only this time the fans were in on it, after the government passed legislation to register superheroes, in a storyline called "Dark Reign", this time villains dressed up as known Avengers, like Bullseye dressed up as Hawkeye, Venom pretended to be Spider-Man, U.S. Agent was the Capt. America stand-in, and so on. Norman Osborn (aka Green Goblin) had recruited another group of villains to serve as a controllable version of the Avengers. Another group of Thunderbolts popped up during this storyline, and years later in another crossover called "King in Black", and yet another in a crossover called "Devil's Reign", set after the Kingpin got elected mayor of New York (something that just happened in the MCU, in the Disney series "Daredevil: Born Again").
So it seems that anytime there's a big multi-title comic book crossover, there's a new version of the Thunderbolts that comes along to sell a few more books. Most recently, following a Captain America storyline titled "Cold War", the Winter Soldier put a team of T-Bolts together that bears a striking resemblance to the movie's line-up: White Widow, Red Guardian, U.S. Agent, and Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, plus a few others. They united for a purpose, to take down the Red Skull, who just never seemed to die all those times he was killed. This was actually the TWELFTH distinct line-up of Thunderbolts in the comics, and currently there's a storyline called "One World Under Doom", following a big vampire crossover in which Dr. Doom stole the title of Earth's Sorcerer Supreme from Dr. Strange, and easily took over the world. Yep, you guessed it, Dr. Doom forms a THIRTEENTH roster of heroes that for some reason does NOT resemble what's seen in their movie, but they're bound to fight the other Thunderbolts at some point.
Anyway, the movie - it would have been very easy to unite these heroes behind-the-scenes, just say they all got drafted by Valentina to serve as a team, because of what happened in "Brave New World", but that seems like it would be a bit too easy. So time has to be spent in this film getting them all to work together, because apparently Valentina didn't introduce them to each other, or think up a team name or get them matching uniforms. But since she's called into a Senate hearing regarding her own impeachment, rather than go public with her behind-the-scenes attempt to employ superheroes as assassin agents, she figures the easiest thing to do would be to send each of her heroes to assassinate another, and I guess with a bit of luck they'll all die, problem solved. What could POSSIBLY go wrong?
Well, they didn't count on the Sentry - another Marvel hero who the comic book writers kind of never knew what to do with. I guess he was designed as an old-school type of hero, with powers similar to Superman, only maybe that seemed a bit old hat, so they kind of after-the-fact wrote him into some of the older storylines, like he'd been around since the formation of the Avengers and Fantastic Four, but for some reason nobody could remember him. This originally had something to do with The Void, which is another entity that lives inside of him, as a result of him getting super-powers, or maybe it's the dark side of his personality that took on sentience of its own. Honestly, every writer handled this a bit differently, and it was often quite confusing. Sentry was part of one Thunderbolts line-up in the comics, and one of the Mighty Avengers or New Avengers teams as well, but I don't know if he ever really caught on with the fans.
In this film, the Sentry project was another attempt to create a super-soldier, with many people volunteering for experiments to give them powers, and all of the experiments seemed like failures, and this guy named Bob fell into a coma after getting the drug or the radiation or whatever, and his body was stored in Valentina's safe-house, which turns out to be the exact location where she sends all the heroes to kill each other in a domino-like chain. But the Sentry gets released accidentally from his storage crate, and appears at first like an innocent bystander who needs to be saved by the anti-hero assassins. Well, those of us who read the comics knew in advance that he's not that, he's a powerful hero with a dark side that will be revealed at the worst possible time. Really, you other movie fans should read a lot more comic books.
But the four lone wolves get together, manage to work together to escape from the deathtrap, and then all they have to do is use their skills and powers to escape the army that's waiting outside. Pretty easy if one of them can turn invisible and hijack a truck - and thankfully once they get away, the Red Guardian arrives with his makeshift limo to pick them up. They barely have time to think up a working team name before they are pursued by the army and then rescued/captured by Winter Soldier, aka Bucky, aka Senator Barnes, (aka Revolution in the comics right now).
Once they all have a minute, it's time to talk about Bob, aka Sentry. Valentina has bought the old lease on Avengers Tower, and is planning to reboot the Avengers team once she figures out how powerful the Sentry is. Here's where she made her mistake, because she had a team of cast-off lone wolf heroes working for her, and she never thought to make them part of a team? Why, a ragtag bunch of failures could be JUST the thing that America needs to believe in superheroes again, why didn't she see that? So she was going to lease out the old Avengers Tower and then start a new team from scratch? We could have just skipped a few steps here, if you ask me, and put the team together a lot sooner. Just saying - I was two moves ahead of her and the writers, I think.
Anyway, the whole team fights the Sentry, and they're no match for him, he's just too powerful. Which Valentina realizes, so she uses an implanted kill switch to shut him down, only this releases The Void. While he turns into a completely black figure and floats above NYC, his darkness spreads and starts sucking random people into it - it's almost like Thanos is back and blipped half the people away out of existence again, only it's much slower. Unfortunately this all seems a bit too much like the first "Suicide Squad" movie, where there really was no villain and the team had to waste time by taking down one of their own members who was out of control. Sure, I get it, superheroes are more complex now and some of them have dark sides to them, but can we get some control here and focus on taking down the bad guys?
Besides, what really happens here, who or what is The Void and why is he blipping people into another dimension where they have to confront their own failures? What purpose does this serve? Is this a form of limbo or hell or some kind of dream realm or nightmare realm? Is some other entity at work here - Nightmare, Mephisto, the Watchers? Well, let's put a pin in that one, because we're not going to find out in this movie. Anyway, there's a big twist here which you've probably already heard about, so it looks like we'll be seeing another Avengers vs. Avengers battle, something like the comic-book crossover "Civil War II". Why stop there? We also need the Young Avengers, which could involve Hawkeye (Kate Bishop), Scarlet Witch's 2 kids (Wiccan and Speed, seen in "Wandavision"), Patriot (Isaiah Bradley's grandson), Ironheart (coming soon to Disney TV), Stature (Ant-Man's daughter Cassie) and if you throw in a teen Hulk (Ska'ar or Amadeus Cho, whichever) then you've got a team there, too. America Chavez maybe, if you want to follow the "Dr. Strange" sequel. We can also have Hawkeye found the West Coast Avengers along with War Machine, Wonder Man, Mockingbird and Tigra, just a thought.
Look, I'm glad we're moving forward, but this is the end of MCU Phase 5, and I fear that Phase 6 is just going to be a lot of multiversal crossovers, and I don't think many of the fans are going to be able to follow that - they haven't had the same training as those of us who've been reading the comics for decades. How do you explain "Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe" or "Weapon X-Men" or "Spider-Verse vs. Venom-Verse" to these people? I don't think you can - I spoke with one older comic book fan after a screening of "Across the Spider-Verse" and he didn't even know who Miles Morales was. So the upcoming Marvel films are bound to lose some fans if the storylines are too confusing.
The recent MCU storylines are based on comic-book stories, but now the comics are changing to reflect some of the same story beats as the movies - in that "One World Under Doom" storyline, the re-formed Thunderbolts are facing off against a new version of Citizen V (who put the first team together) and the person under the Citizen V mask is Valentina Allegra de Fontaine herself, who revealed that in her prior appearances she was an LMD (life model decoy) but now she's a real human, back and in control. And they brought back the Red Hulk comic book for this same crossover, with Thaddeus Ross back as the Red Hulk instead of that General Maverick stand-in.
Directed by Jake Schreier (director of "Robot & Frank")
Also starring Florence Pugh (last seen in "Dune: Part Two"), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (last seen in "You Hurt My Feelings"), Lewis Pullman (last seen in "Top Gun: Maverick"), David Harbour (last seen in "We Have a Ghost"), Wyatt Russell (last seen in "Overlord"), Hannah John-Kamen (last seen in "Tomb Raider"), Olga Kurylenko (last seen in "Extraction II"), Geraldine Viswanathan (last seen in "Blockers"), Wendell Pierce (last seen in "Waiting to Exhale"), Chris Bauer (last seen in "The Myth of Fingerprints"), Violet McGraw (last seen in "Black Widow"), Alexa Swinton (last seen in "Maestro"), Eric Lange (last seen in "Wind River"), Chiara Stella, Stefano Carannante, Gianfranco Terrin (last seen in "Live by Night"), Gabrielle Byndloss (last seen in "The Tomorrow War"), Regina Ting Chen (last seen in "Reptile"), Jennifer Chung, Julia Aku (last seen in "Maestro"), Clayton Cooper, Joshua Mikel (last seen in "Trial by Fire"), Molly Carden, Chad Gall.
RATING: 7 out of 10 "shame rooms"
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