Yelena Belova liked being a hero. But a woman’s gotta pay the bills. And it’s not like her skills as an assassin translate well in, say, telemarketing.
And her skills are in demand. Yelena’s been working for Valentina Allegra de Fontaine for a while now. As Valentina’s been fending off impeachment in her current role as CIA director, Yelena’s been cleaning up the woman’s former work as head of OXE Group, an incredibly shady conglomerate involved in some incredibly shady projects.
Yeah, if the Congressional impeachment committee got wind of those projects, Valentina could kiss her cushy CIA job goodbye—and say hello to a nice, gray prison cell. So she sends Yelena to, ahem, do a little cleaning. Blow up a warehouse here, silence a would-be informant there … you know, the usual.
But Yelena is increasingly dissatisfied. “I’m not focused, and I’m not happy, and I don’t have purpose,” she confesses to a bound-and-gagged security guard (whom she, of course, bound and gagged). It’s time for a change.
And boy, does Valentina have a change in mind.
Ms. de Fontaine sends Yelena off to OXE Groups’ most-especially secret bunker, where all its most-especially secret secrets are kept. Someone’s trying to steal those secrets, Valentina says, and Yelena needs to kill the thief and destroy everything in that bunker.
Funny thing, though. Val said the very same thing to another cleaner she soon meets there, John Walker, who’d been Captain America for, like, a minute before he was driven out by shame and scandal. Val also called Ava Starr, another woman with a checkered past (and who most noticeably dabbled in villainy in Ant-Man and the Wasp). Oh, and she gave a little jingle to Antonia Dreykov, alias Taskmaster, alias the most fearsome assassin that the Black Widow Red Room ever churned out.
Yep, Valentina was ready to tie up loose ends and silence her secrets for good—including her secret operatives. Can’t have assassins running around and blabbing to CNN, can we? And just in case they didn’t all successfully kill each other, why not turn the whole bunker into a giant furnace and incinerate everything? Sounds like a good plan to Val.
When the doors on the secret bunker seal tight and the air begins to heat up, the four assassins (well, by then, three assassins) realize that they’ve been had. And even though they kinda hate each other, they all now hate Valentina just a wee bit more. They’ll have to work together, somehow, to escape.
Oh, and they they’ll have to figure out what to do about Bob.
Yeah, that’s right. Bob. The guy in the pajamas. The guy who has no idea why he’s in a super-secret bunker. The guy who feels as out of place as Yelena would feel in a series of telemarketing cubicles.
Well, since he’s here, might as well rescue him, too.
Yelena and her imperfect posse (which, with the addition of Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier as well as Yelena’s own father figure, Alexei/Red Guardian, become the “Thunderbolts”) do not consider themselves heroes. “We’re all losers!” Yelena says. And yep, every single member has done some bad, bad things.
But hey, people can change. And that’s the tarnished gem found in Thunderbolts*.
These failed do-gooders and successful assassins ultimately meld into a group of sacrificial heroes who work together to protect the innocent—perhaps to their own surprise. It’s not a quick or seamless process, but they become a team.
And while their abilities lack the horsepower of, say, Avengers-level superheroes, their most potent collective power is—and I know this sounds sappy—community. In this superhero movie, a hug can be more powerful than a slug.
See, the greatest enemy of the Thunderbolts isn’t necessarily Val or the arch-nemesis whom she helps develop. It’s regret. Despair. Depression. The Big Bad here—the Void—isn’t just a physical enemy to be beaten. It’s a force lurking inside each of our protagonists (and let’s be honest, in many of us, too). “I have a lot of bad days where I know nothing matters,” one character confesses. Perhaps a few of us can relate.
But Yelena, familiar with that own black void inside herself, finds a ward against that despair: her relationships, as damaged as imperfect as they may be. When she learns that one of her own friends is in serious trouble, Yelena knows she can’t fix him. But she makes it clear that she’ll always be there for him. In the context of the movie, that means a lot.
It’s telling, perhaps, that the team’s name came from Yelena’s youth soccer team. That team of Thunderbolts was also a bunch of “losers.” Yelena says that they didn’t win a game the entire season. But she loved it. Her father, Alexei, said that she practically glowed with joy during games. She served as the team’s goalie, and Alexei remembered little Yelena explaining why: “I want to be the one everyone can rely on if they make a mistake,” she said at the time.
If you look at the Positive Elements section of this review, you can see places where you could hang some spiritual talking points. For instance, most of our characters are looking for redemption. The themes of community remind us that the “threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12).
But identifying explicit spiritual content is a different matter.
Val’s super-powered creation is compared to a “god,” and she brags that his powers are more powerful than all the Avengers rolled into one. Val’s arrogance leads that creation to call himself a god. After all, he reasons, the Avengers had at least one god (Thor) on the roster: If he’s stronger than the Avengers as a whole, that makes Val’s project a powerful deity indeed.
“Why would a god take orders from anyone at all?” he says.
Alexei, aka the Soviet Union’s former Red Guardian, reminisces about the days when he was a real hero to his people and “adored like a god.”
Alexei lounges around in his boxers and T-shirt.
You’ll find the typical assortment of superhero melees in Thunderbolts*. Characters punch and are punched, kick and are kicked, etc. People get beaten up; thrown around (quite literally); and left winded and disheveled. And none of our protagonists adhere to a “no kill” ethos. Scores of people likely die here, via bullet or knife, explosion or helicopter crash.
But while the overall violence level is pretty much on par with MCU history, Thunderbolts* comes with a few notable wrinkles.
Kids are subjected to violence here in one way or another. Many of these scenes take the form of flashbacks, showing how our very flawed protagonists may have received their deepest psychological wounds. And many of them involve someone else.
As a child, for example, Yelena lured a fellow Red Room chum into the woods, where an assassin calmly shoots the girl off-camera. (We see the flashback repeatedly. And in one, when Yelena tries to save the girl, the girl attacks—throwing Yelena aside to complete the scene.) Another Yelena flashback shows how she assembles a gun faster than her Red Room classmates. As a “reward,” she’s taken aside while the other girls hold out their hands to be whipped.
Elsewhere, another character recalls to the moment when her father was murdered, shot in the stomach by someone else. A guy recalls his abusive home life as a child: We don’t see the abuse, but we hear how the boy tried to stop his father from assaulting his mom. But his mother scolds the boy, telling him to stop playing the hero. “You always make everything worse,” she tells her son. In the present, one girl simply vanishes—transforming into just a black, fading shadow.
She’s not the only person on screen to disappear like that. A darkness begins to creep across New York City, causing countless people to dissipate like smoke.
Someone is shot dozens of times, but he somehow survives. A scientist is accidentally shot in the face. We don’t see any blood, but Yelena grouses over the fact that she needed that face to access a secret laboratory. (Another victim of an accidental shooting is covered in a bit of blood in that same scene.) A masked character gets shot in the head, and some blood oozes from the wound. Sonic weapons disable some would-be heroes. Part of a building explodes.
Explosions lift cars and military vehicles up in the air and send them tumbling. A man chokes a woman. Bucky’s artificial limb is ripped off his shoulder. Helicopters crash. A vehicle runs straight through a building’s floor-to-ceiling windows. Several people are knocked unconscious. Debris threatens to crush and kill civilians. A few characters nearly fall to their deaths. People talk about past violent misdeeds. We hear that scores of volunteers died as part of a scientific experiment.
Some 13 s-words are scattered throughout the film. We also hear “a–,” “d–k,” “h—” and “pr–k.” God’s name is misused about 20 times (twice with the word “d–n”), and Jesus’ name is abused six times.
Bob admits that he was a meth addict. We see a flashback to when he was working high as a sign-twirler dressed as a chicken, and he beat passersby with the sign. (He was looking for ways to keep his habit fed when he stumbled on an OXE Group scientific experiment, which promised him plenty of drugs.)
Yelena confesses that her evenings feel very much the same: When she gets off work, she goes home and thinks about all the awful things she’s done. And then she drinks. And in a flashback that doesn’t seem all that long ago, Yelena sits slumped against a bathtub, a couple of empty bottles of booze lying on the floor.
Val and others drink champagne during a posh gala. Alexei drinks beer in his apartment.
Alexei also works as a limo driver. In one scene, he drives the limo as the rest of the Thunderbolts fret about the mercenaries pursuing them. He asks for someone to hand him a bottle of vodka, which someone does. Still driving, he takes a swig from the bottle before setting it alight and throwing it at their pursuers.
As Yelena reminisces about her youth soccer team, she recalls how one of her teammates defecated on the field. Later, Alexei recounts the same story.
Bob makes a ton of retching noises after he’s first discovered.
Valentina lies, and lies, and lies some more. And she’s not the only one.
We learn that a character alienated his wife and child through inattention to them.
They don’t make heroes like they used to.
Certainly, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has always been well stocked with fallen, fractured heroes. Iron Man’s Tony Stark was a heel before he became a hero, and he had his caddish moments well after, too. Thor was a spoiled brat. Bruce Banner had his anger issues. Only Steve Rogers, aka the original Captain America, seemed to come without a closetful of issues.
But Thunderbolts* brings a new level of dysfunction to the MCU. Staffed by fallen crusaders, one-time assassins and a guy named Bob, this superhero team is barely super and, most of the time, hardly heroic.
And that’s why the movie works.
Listen, I’m as much a Captain America fan as anyone, and the antihero trope can be overused. I like my do-gooders to, y’know, do good. And if the Thunderbolts* existed in our reality, its members should all pay their debts to society with a little jailtime. Redemption is great and all, but you just can’t go around killing people without someone saying, Hey, a little time in Maximum Security might do you good.
And let’s not downplay the movie’s problems: the violence, the language, the allusions some make to godhood.
But the characters we’re asked to follow here don’t pretend to be gods. They don’t pretend to be even particularly good. Yelena seems particularly attuned to her fallen nature. The weight of her guilt and (we’ll just say it) sin weighs on her. The Void pulls at her—the promise of absolution through annihilation. The whisper of peace through the deadening of thought, of will, perhaps of self.
But Alexei—a crazy, embarrassing bear of a man whom Yelena tries to avoid and, for a minute, pretends she doesn’t know, even though he helped raise her—barrels in with a zest for adventure and the ridiculous idea that these flawed people can be good. They can be a team. They can heal a little bit of the world instead of hurting it, for a change. And in his own unhinged way, Alexei becomes a catalyst for their redemption. Most especially, for Yelena’s redemption. “When I look at you, I don’t see your mistakes,” Alexei tells her.
In that moment, I thought of our own heavenly Father, the Holy God who sees beyond our own mistakes and failings and scars and fallenness. He sees the men and women that He created through His joy and generosity. He sees the beautiful people we were designed to be and, with His help, can still be. He sees us and loves us. In fact, He loved us enough to send Jesus to die for our flaws and sins, to restore right relationship with Him, which we could not do on our own.
Presumably, the creators of Thunderbolts* didn’t have God in mind when they made this movie. But they were mindful of the hurt in the world. How cruelly we can be treated, and how cruel we can be in return. How awful we can be to ourselves, especially. And how we so need each other to help us through.
In one scene, one of our heroes struggles to hold up a massive slab of stone—weakening slowly as the rock threatens to crush him. But one by one, his friends show up, pushing against the stone at risk to themselves. Until, finally, they push it away. Such a simple scene, really. But in the context of this movie, a powerful one.
Life is hard. Sometimes, it can threaten to crush us. But we can help each other. We can, as the Good Book says, lift each other’s burdens. We can be each other’s heroes. And together, we can push forward every day—moving through the dark nights of our lives and toward the rising sun.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
