This past weekend, I finally pulled the trigger on watching Marvel’s Thunderbolts*, and yeah, it’s not that bad — a solid three and a half stars on Letterboxd. My only gripes were that those two after-credit scenes weren’t worth missing the night bus home, and I wish the film had stuck to its escape-room-style opening act instead of veering into being a bog-standard Marvel movie. The most annoying part of it is, it almost was the movie I was hoping for.
Spoilers for the movie’s first act.
Thunderbolts’ premise is pretty straightforward — granted, I had to pick my brain to remember all the characters it threw into its cast to comprise its post-Endgame “New Avengers” like fumbling in your kitchen utility drawer, fishing for batteries you're sure must be there. Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ character is a shady government official on the verge of being impeached for her super-secret and highly illegal superhero experiments. To cover her tracks, she enlists a bunch of depressed stragglers plucked from various small marquee MCU projects: Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Natasha Romanoff’s depressed little sister from that Black Widow you couldn’t pay me to watch; John Walker (Wyatt Russel), the crash-out divorce court Captain America from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which bored me to tears; Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) from the second Ant-Man movie that barely registers in my memory banks; and Taskmaster (lol). Their mission is to bury the evidence stashed at the bottom of a bunker somewhere in a random desert.
After a well-executed fight, remarkably coherent despite Marvel’s tendency to cut action scenes like Liam Neeson scrambling over a fence, the team realizes they’re included among the evidence they were sent to get rid of. The suicide squad on suicide watch then rally together to break out of the locked evidence room before a bomb detonates, shimmy their way out of a well by linking their elbows and walking up its walls Emperor’s New Groove-style, and hold their own against an incoming militia hell-bent on finishing the job.
In the chaos, they stumble upon a mysterious civilian named Bob, locked in a box in the now scorched evidence room. Of course, the trailers and months of casting blogs already revealed that Bob is Sentry, the film’s central villain. The crew assumes that his presence indicates that this is an escort mission on top of their escape room situation, until they’re forced to relive the darkest moments in their lives when he makes direct contact with them.
Wouldn’t you know it, this Marvel movie had me leaning forward and fully engaged because, for once, it felt like a film. Twenty minutes into the movie, I started to believe Marvel wasn’t just throwing around indie-film buzzwords for the sake of marketing. That they leaned into boasting a cast from Midsommar, A Different Man, and You Hurt My Feelings; the writers and director of Beef; the cinematographer of The Green Knight; the production designer of Hereditary; the editor of Minari; and the composers of Everything Everywhere All At Once. With director Jake Schreier (Kendrick Lamar’s “We Cry Together”) at the helm, Thunderbolts felt like it could be wildly different from middling Marvel slop I’d sat through before — less about an apocalyptic beam in the sky or widespread destruction of a metropolitan city, and more about the characters themselves through the underutilized escape room genre.
Sure, there’s still fun with the movie, depending on your tolerance for David Harbour delivering non-sequiturs in a thick Russian accent as Red Guardian. But I couldn’t help slinking into my seat, frustrated at the missed potential for Marvel to pull a WandaVision by making an unconventional premise (for them) that I would’ve loved to have watched instead. Basically, I was deprived of viewing what I believe could’ve been Marvel’s version of Cube (1997).
Cube, directed by Vincenzo Natali, is a 1997 Canadian sci-fi horror film. It follows a group of strangers who wake up trapped in a mysterious maze of interconnected cube-shaped rooms. Despite being identical, each room has its Saw-like traps inside, leading the group to decipher each room’s deal, chart a safe course out of the maze, and keep their paranoia in check before they go postal and start killing each other out of frustration. One of my favorite scenes is when the ragtag group cleverly figures out they can spring traps by tossing a shoe into the rooms. Only, their pump fake isn’t foolproof because a guy gets a face full of acid and dies after doing the shoe trick. Cube rocks, and for a moment, I thought Thunderbolts was gearing up to channel that same energy until it didn’t. What makes the situation even more maddening for me is that Marvel was originally going to do something similar to my fan-crafted storyline, until it changed plans.
Speaking with Polygon, original Thunderbolts screenwriter Eric Pearson revealed that one of the original scripts for the movie saw it take on a bottle episode approach where its characters would’ve done pretty much what I wanted them to do above, saying:
The notes I got toward the beginning were like, “Let’s make this contained and very grounded.” And when you throw out Die Hard in your movie pitch, everybody just latches onto that” So yeah, they’re in this deathtrap, and I think they got out more toward the end of the second act, as opposed to the midpoint.
But that was maybe the first one or two drafts. And then as we folded in Bucky, as we folded in Bob, it pretty quickly became the midpoint. And then when Jake came on, he really wanted a little bit of road-trippiness in the second half of act two. At some points, we had way too much road trip stuff going on, when the movie really should be gaining momentum. But [with early drafts] you’re trying out new ideas, and some of them are ridiculous. But you try ‘em out and you’re able to scrap ‘em and move on.
Despite Pearson admitting that his original take on the film wasn’t “very good,” he maintained that the core structure of the final film remained largely the same as his initial pitch — save for Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige tagging on one note that the low-stakes MCU movie would ultimately tie into the film rebranding its team as the New Avengers.
“And I was like, ‘Oh, okay, cool. That’s your problem for later. And if that’s the only note that you’re giving me from this, then hell yeah, I’m going to take the money and run, and go start writing this movie,’ Pearson told Polygon. “I’ve been in plenty of Marvel pitches. You don’t get out of them with one note very often.”
The more I dug into Thunderbolt’s production after watching it, the more frustrating it became knowing it had all the ingredients for a genuinely spectacular, refreshingly different Marvel movie baked into its DNA. Instead, Thunderbolts remains, well… a Marvel movie, though granted it's pretty decent. I wouldn’t go so far to celebrate it solely for being a triumphant return to form for the MCU, but it's definitely a competent film that even CinemaSins wouldn’t ding for having the basics: a well-structured script, poignant themes, legible action, a director with an actual vision, and music that isn’t an afterthought.
Still, the film is good in that Marvel way — a carefully calibrated, user-retention way. It’s the kind of structured reliability woven into every MCU entry, like jangling keys designed to keep kids and middle-aged men transfixed with what’s next instead of what’s right in front of them. That said, the last time a director dared to break convention was Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness, and it sent folks into hysterics over how uncharacteristically non-superhero it was. So my wishful thinking about Thunderbolts embracing its boldest instincts would never make it past Marvel’s assembly-line approach to filmmaking.
Still, suppose I had Sentry’s power during Thunderbolts’ production. In that case, I’d channel my inner Lady Macbeth, whispering — or more likely, screaming — “Cube” into director Schrier’s ear until he commits to making Thunderbolts a bizarre, different, and bold escape room horror thriller, rather than barely getting away with coloring outside the lines of the Marvel formula.
