Thunderbolts*: MCU's first sign of life in years is obsessed with death

The Marvel Cinematic Universe hasn't exactly been in a perfect headspace lately.

First, the perhaps unfairly panned The Marvels failed to generate hype over a new crop of superheroes buttressing the MCU's crumbling facade.

Then, a procession of weakly received, minimally watched series failed to ferry fans over the gap between the old Avengers' departures and the much-awaited arrival of the Fantastic Four and finally (finally) mutants.

Then, the almost supernaturally bland Captain America: Brave New World failed to do anything other than examine how much boredom a human mind is actually capable of experiencing.

The less said about that, the better.

So to say Marvel has been on something of a downward spiral is probably a bit of an understatement. And it would make sense for some of the writing to reflect that — a little bitterness, or even ennui, seeping into storylines otherwise made cheery by all that neon spandex, millennial quippiness and saving the world from the forces of evil.

What was not expected was Thunderbolts*: a Suicide Squad-adjacent tale of ragtag misfits so infused with themes of depression, nihilism and death it could almost work as a spiritual sequel to Donnie Darko.

But what was maybe even more unexpected is that those ingredients turned into a formula that is — for all intents and purposes — a pretty great movie.

But just to catch you up for Thunderbolts*, here's where we stand.

Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), professional assassin and pseudo-sister to Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow, is working as a criminal-for-hire. She's in and out of secretive government labs with all the glum professionalism of A Christmas Story's mall Santa — dutifully predicting where to stick her knee or boot well before her marks even know what hit them.

It's all meaningless, though. As she tells a bound and gagged man she's currently robbing, she's drifting through her own life like a river. Or like an old leaf. Or like an old leaf in a river. Or whatever — she's barely even listening to herself at this point. Because, you know, what even is the point?

What she needs is a change: one her sort-of father, sort-of retired, sort-of Soviet superhero Red Guardian (David Harbour) tells her can only be found in a cheering, adoring crowd. In search of the hero's life that might just give her meaning, she tells her handler and current CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) she wants something more fulfilling, more heroic, more public-facing.

This comes at a difficult time for de Fontaine, though; she's currently embroiled in an impeachment trial getting ever closer to discovering her criminal dealings. The solution? Send Yelena for one last job.

Tell her she just needs to assassinate Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen) — the teleporting anti-hero from Ant-Man and the Wasp — whom de Fontaine claims is headed to her bunker to steal evidence of her illegal work. But when she gets there, Yelena also encounters John Walker (Wyatt Russell), the disgraced, temporary Captain America replacement now on de Fontaine's payroll — and apparently hired to assassinate her in turn.

What follows is your typical Mexican standoff misunderstanding, as all three quickly figure out they're loose ends de Fontaine merely means to tie up — either by them finishing one another off or via the furnace jets waiting overhead in the now-locked room. What de Fontaine didn't expect, however, was the professional criminal delinquents somehow managing to get over their egos to team up.

Even less expected, though, was the man who crawled out of a box in the confusion. He says his name is Bob. Bob Reynolds. And he has no more of an idea over how he got there than we do.

For those hoping for a pure surprise, it would be best to stop here. But for even casual comics fans, it shouldn't come as much of a shock over who this man ends up being.

Robert (Bob) Reynolds, better known as Sentry, is right up there with Molecule Man, Adam Warlock and Franklin Richards as among the most powerful human-ish heroes on offer. Operating as a sort of Marvel Superman analogue, there's little he can't do, few he can't beat. Played here by Lewis Pullman, the Sentry's main comics flaw is equally his downfall in the movie universe: a man gifted powers through a super serum that did nothing to solve the deep and overwhelming mental health problems at his core.

Out of that convoluted introduction, comes a more straightforward theme. From Yelena's flailings toward meaning and away from her trauma-soaked childhood, to Walker's self-destructive distance from his family, to the Red Guardian's painfully strong but faded memories of being important once, all the way to Bob's volatile reckoning with the violent void inside himself, Thunderbolts* is almost shockingly direct in its message.

This is a film about pain, about pointlessness — Pugh is Thunderbolts*' true heart here, and from the morose, self-defeating monologue she delivers at the top all the way to the painful memories dredged up toward the end, she hammers that point home.

That is in the face of some plot flabbiness. Sebastian Stan's Bucky Barnes appears to be more or less the famous face tacked on for MCU continuity's sake, and the political intrigue subplot he spars in alongside a fellow congressman (Wendell Pierce) and de Fontaine's assistant (Geraldine Viswanathan) barely holds together. Meanwhile, Sentry's creation ends up being only slightly less ridiculous and hard to believe than in the comics — a lingering issue as super serums make super powers more common, and the abilities they grant necessarily become more and more powerful to compensate.

But it almost doesn't matter as Bob's storyline pulls in what is one of the most surprisingly incisive and boldly discomfiting elements since Killmonger's depressingly convincing villain monologue in Black Panther. In the comics, Sentry's main weakness is his own depression, self-hatred and shame — a nagging sense of inadequacy and terror so powerful it gains its own mirror identity as "the Void."

Ignoring this film's likely record of being the first Marvel movie to recognize the existence of meth, the way it grapples with those themes feel uniquely direct. Questions of meaninglessness, loneliness, worthlessness and the occasionally appealing allure of death all find their way into a franchise shared with Cosmo the Spacedog and giant screaming space goats. And despite a slightly after-school-special handling in the end, the vast majority of the film feels like it understands how paralyzing those emotions can be.

Multiple times characters tell others they understand the call of the void — the unnervingly common impulse to flirt with certain death. The opening moments of the film even feature Yelena stepping balletically from the edge of a building; only seconds later do we see she has a parachute.

This is not to say Thunderbolts* is overwhelmingly dour — there are all the effective, jokey one-liners you'd expect from an MCU epic. But there's something darker there too, handled with more seriousness, respect and directness than previously felt possible. It's a refreshing sign of life from a franchise that long ago seemed to have given up the ghost.