Spoiler – The reason the title of this movie has an asterisk is that at the end of the movie, the super-team gets a new name. Thunderbolts is a “working title” in reference to a girls’ soccer league team that one of the characters joined in childhood, which never won a game. Which is about in spirit with the rest of the movie.
Much like the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, Thunderbolts* is about non-heroic losers who get pulled together to face a world-threatening foe. But while the Guardians were mostly played for laughs with some very serious underpinnings, Thunderbolts* has a few laughs overlaid on an exploration of inner darkness. Which at the climax of the movie becomes literal.
On paper, the most successful of these characters is Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Shaw), who survived near-death and cryo-freezing to become a cyborg hero and parlayed his time in the Avengers towards a successful run for Congress. But he is still haunted by the crimes he had to commit as the brainwashed Winter Soldier.
Then there’s Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) a former Black Widow who escaped her own brainwashing but is still weighed by her past and by the loss of her step-sister Natasha Romanoff. As her dad Alexei (David Harbour) tells her, “The light in you is dimmer, even by Eastern European standards.”
Seeing no other options in life, Yelena has decided to become a black-ops agent for the head of the CIA, Selina Meyer Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) who is currently being impeached by Congress for vast amounts of skullduggery, which is where Congressman Barnes comes in. Yelena’s last job takes her to a remote mountain fortress to eliminate super-thief Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen, who gets a lot more dialogue here than she got in Ant-Man and the Wasp). Inside the lab, the two of them are attacked by John Walker, the disgraced ex-Captain America (Wyatt Russell) and they quickly figure out that they’re all DeFontaine employees that she set up to eliminate each other, and then they realize that they’re all trapped in the fortress with Bob (Lewis Pullman). This guy. Just this guy.
See, the underlying goal of all these black projects that DeFontaine was working on, and that she hired Yelena and the others to eliminate, was to develop yet another super-soldier project, only this version would be mega-evolved and capable of fulfilling all the functions of the Avengers in their absence. And unbeknownst to all, including DeFontaine, the last surviving experiment in that project is the guy in scrubs who just happened to wake up in the top-secret facility with advanced hardware.
The three super agents escape and are first rescued by Alexei, aka “Red Guardian” and then captured and interrogated by Bucky, but in the meantime DeFontaine has retrieved her project and plans to announce him at the refurbished Avengers Tower in New York, and that goes about as well as illegal government projects have been going lately. Bob succumbs to a literal dark side that engulfs all of New York City, and since all of these guys have only minor super powers, the “Thunderbolts” decide to surrender to the Void, and in the end, they defeat it with the power … of friendship. No. Really. Seriously, it actually works.
I did not expect much of this movie, especially since the previews included Starship on the soundtrack, but Thunderbolts* turned out to be both entertaining and insightful. The two main insights were these: First, one does not overcome darkness by fighting it or avoiding it, but by confronting and moving through it. And second related to the first, sometimes brute force is not the best solution to your problems, which doesn’t mean you can’t use a whole lot of it in order to find that out.