Oh no! I liked a Marvel movie! Kind of!

It’s no secret that Marvel has been stumbling in the film department for the past few years. While tv shows like WandaVision were successful in bringing the MCU audience to Disney+ after Avengers: Endgame, every subsequent entry in the franchise have been bringing diminishing returns. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 tied up any emotional loose ends fans of those characters may have had, a nice antidote to rote sequel after rote sequel and failures to launch characters like Shang-Chi and the Eternals into the same kind of mainstream success. And while Captain America: Brave New World was a complete narrative dud, the MCU’s latest Thunderbolts turned out to be a surprisingly engaging blockbuster in many ways. I’ve been catching up on Phase Five for a project with Jams & Tea, but I wanted to highlight the most surprising experience I had during this process: discovering that Thunderbolts is kind of good.

Though I couldn’t stand this character’s tonally uneven dialogue in Black Widow, Pugh’s performance this time around as a more focused Yelena Belova, who brings a new kind of exhaustion to the necessity of the superhuman proceedings. When she talks about fully subsuming herself into her work to distract her processing of the loss of her sister, I believe that this character is genuinely troubled in a way the arrested development attitude of her debut could never properly convey. Pugh is carrying this movie on her shoulders for a majority of the time, as I find the rest of the Thunderbolts cast members dreadfully dull; which to some extent is the point but it’s nevertheless an issue. The limp re-introduction of a lot of these characters is saved by well-directed hand to hand combat and a one-room thriller approach to the first act, a nice change of pace from recent intergalactic brouhaha other entries have been indulging in.

Then there’s Lewis Pullman as Bob, who brings a reserved tenderness to a very boring comic book character. The Sentry’s whole schtick is always much more interesting to think about than actually read, but Pullman brings a similarly believable damage to Bob, a fresh product of scientific experimentation to make a new superhero from scratch as an agent of the state. There’s a compelling mystery to Bob, his presence taking the movie out of street-level supers territory and firmly into cape land. Sebastian Stan, one of the best performers of the primary Avengers cast, also fits well into the movie’s tone as a super soldier shackled by white collar responsibility, with former Russian asset and world leader murderer Bucky Barnes now a Congressman. Marvel embracing a tone of exhaustion and inadequacy that applies across so many members of this cast give this movie an effective underdog status, even as the film goes directly into David Ayer Suicide Squad territory with its antihero misfits now up against a godlike power.

However, dear reader, I even enjoyed the third act shift into grand spectacle thanks to striking art direction, the shadows of people disappearing from the streets as the Void begins his onslaught being a unique visual idea for this world. The design of the Void, a shadow with only the whites of his eyes to project any semblance of humanity, also works in effective contrast to the asphalt color palette, a fully embraced and artistically minded grayscale aesthetic that uses intention to set itself apart from the previous concrete clusters these movies can devolve into. Something about the power of friendship and mutual understanding of suffering letting Yelena and Bob overcome their respective traumas at the peak of the conflict hits just right, the chemistry of Pugh and Pullman shining through superhero movie gunk that would normally completely turn me off.

Thunderbolts is unique for this period of the franchise, one that somehow manages to build off of multiple maligned entries in the series to make something great with unexpected characters, a kind of charm that’s been missing for quite some time, and tactile action in the first two acts that fit the comparably reserved approach. I don’t think this is gonna get me to buy a ticket to the next Avengers film proper, but I’ll likely have a soft spot for Thunderbolts going forward, which is a nice surprise.