Disney-fied ‘Thunderbolts*’ Are ‘The New Avengers’ Are D.O.A.

Possibly the Funniest Movie of the Year, But Not In the Way the Rat Kingdom Intended

“…And a sad clown midget shall lead them!” Disney Marvel’s Thunderbolts* bears zero resemblance to the decades-established Marvel Comics team; it’s merely another condescending and low-I.Q. bait’n’switch estrogenized propaganda product, this time sillier and more absurd and even easier to mock and laugh at than most.

“I’m so alone. All I do is sit and look at my phone and think of all the terrible things I’ve done and then I go to work and I drink and then I come home to no one, and I sit and think about all the terrible things I’ve done. I have so many!” — weeping Black Widow, Jr., Thunderbolts*

“Another night, same old story. I'm thirty and so alone. My heart aches, drowning in regrets and alcohol. Doom scrolling and missed chances haunt me. This empty apartment mocks my dreams. Time ticks on, hope fades. Will I ever find my soulmate, or am I destined to wander this lonely road forever?” — Grok-written monologue, following prompt of “Grok: Could you give me a roughly 50-60 word soliloquy from a cliché-ridden unmarried alcoholic 30 year old professional women and ‘Karen’ who sits home alone every night ruminating over her failures?”

$ $ $ $ $ $

Rule of Three! I blame thee!

The pre-requisite number of modern-but-not-modern-audience critics who seemed honest but now I’m not so sure made me reluctantly decide to see Disney Marvel’s new big budget Thunderbolts* on the biggest and best screen possible earlier this week, so I could deem for myself.

BUT NO IT'S TERRIBLE. TERRIBLE!

For 90 minutes or so — after buying a ticket to Angel Studios’ King Of Kings (which I’d already seen), then slipping into the screen nearby — I thought Thunderbolts* was maybe going to be a junky guilty pleasure with a lot wrong but a good heart and I was going to have to eat some shit for mocking it before it came out and then seeing it for myself; mostly lousy, sure, but I would be forced to admit I was mildly entertained with cinematic spectacle and dumb fun.

(Un?)Fortunately that proved not the case: The latest pellet of Rat Kingdom comic book product implodes into an unintentionally hilarious and on-the-nose train wreck in the last half hour. I did my best to stifle my laughter and not ruin the movie for a couple parents with kids nearby, but wow wow wow was it a dog’s howl.

It’s also yet another Sign O’ The Times, the perilous evidence of how a relentless assault of dumbed-down dreck will degrade the I.Q. of people who should know better. Thunderbolts* ultimately proves a terrific case study of how, when you keep shoveling absolute garbage at people over and over, when they get something slightly less crapola for once, they think it’s chocolate. Judgement has been dulled, numbed, torpefied, after years of mediocrity, if not outright abuse.

With the most generous accolades possible, Thunderbolts* is maybe a two-star movie, tops (out of four-stars, the ratings system all the best, most professional and highly esteemed film critics from Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert to Leslie Halliwell to Pauline Kael to Leonard Maltin to me have always used). But people have been getting so many one-star duds from Disney Marvel — and Disney in general — in multiplexes and on Bobby Igor’s failing streaming network, that when they see a quickly forgettable two-star movie with a couple good things going for it, they think it’s a three-star movie worth your attention.

Thunderbolts* isn’t a two-star movie, IMHO, it’s one-and-a-half, slightly better than what we’ve been getting from über-pale and increasingly cadaverous-looking producer Kevin Feige’s untalented misanthropic spook show. It’s yet another feminized — not even feminist! — fiasco from the Rat Kingdom; worth your attention, but not until it finally reaches you at home sometime for free (or if you buy a ticket to King of Kings), and only then as a lab rat example of how far gone we are, following years of Holly Wood psychological warfare.

"When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of mediocre entertainments and not Art, then a nation finds itself at risk; the ability to perceive quality is dulled, and culture-death is a clear possibility." — Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

The plot isn’t much worth discussing. It’s basically second-and-third tier Marvel misfits teaming up to stop a Big Bad and the corrupt government functionary behind it, and full of characters I either mostly didn’t like or didn’t know (“Ghost”? Who the heck is Ghost?) beforehand, often from stories content product I didn’t watch on a struggling streaming platform I refuse to pay.

I’ll freely admit that while the movie product’s first two acts are illogically plotted and partway bigly miscast, the movie product’s not lame and not boring. It’s halfway fun, with a couple good fight scenes and decent SFX, despite the annoyingly dark and dreary cinematography and too much inappropriately placed "Marvel humor” that wouldn’t be so bad if it was genuinely funny but it almost never is.

There are even a couple good performances, from David Harbour and Lewis Pullman; the former’s just got “IT,” I’m not sure the guy’s capable of a bad turn, even as a blustery over-the-top Russian former commie-version of Captain America; the latter actor comes from out of nowhere to bring unexpected emotional range to a role that I don’t want to much talk about because it’s one of the few really good things the movie’s got going for it, even if it’s also responsible for the disaster it turns into at the end.

Ah yes, “The End.” Thunderbolts*’s third act commits comically dark creative hari-kari, in a bizarre schizophrenic can’t-look-away car crash amateur therapy session and mostly non-action “climax,” with much talk about feelings and trauma and failure and being alone, oh-so-alone. It’s mind-boggling in its un-fun incompetence and mentally mud-bogged “we have no clue WTF we are doing” navel-gazing anti-entertainment that Bobby Igor’s-not-Walt Disney specializes in. You could laugh or cry, and I chose to laugh. Mock and laugh.

For a goodly portion of the third act climax, all the heroes but one get off-screened; then when later re-united, they are sidelined entirely and forced to watch while a new super-character is fighting his literal “dark side” in what feels like a cascading series of heavy handed “look at my important subtext!” tropes that might’ve worked as a quirky minor success narratively and thematically if Marvel was still knocking out banger after banger like they used to, but instead all we’ve gotten is heavy handed and anti-fun “look at my important subtext!” in lieu of good stories and compelling characters, and we’re sick of it. Sick of it! Mock and laugh!

The movie’s dark cinematography also saps fun out of proceedings. If they'd had the guts to call this “Dark Avengers” instead of Thunderbolts* (as had been rumored), I'd have been impressed & given them cineaste points. But that would take guts and Disney is gutless, so instead what we’ve got is just another under-lit (does Holly Wood not have any good lighting people anymore?!? Why so dark? Because you’re all so dark?), irritating and pretentious "look" for a film that didn't need to have it. Everything in Thunderbolts* looks dreary, washed out, blah, except for the second post-credit sequence, which is directed by the guy who's directing this summer's increasingly feasible forthcoming Fantastic Four flop, but at least his contribution had some color and pop, and I appreciated it.

There’s also a terrible and unfunny post-credit sequence where David Harbour’s Russian superhero tries and fails to pick up a dumpy, frumpy, lumpy Asian chick at the grocery store, as if a “New Avenger” with an active libido wouldn’t be nailing starfucker hotties effortlessly left & right. It’s another cheap shot bigoted anti-white male jibe from the Rat Kingdom, very much in the same vein as black Avenger the Falcon who just saved the world being unable to get a bank loan on Disney+ because America is, you know, an inherently racist country. Resign, Bobby Igor. Resign!

I haven’t mentioned Thunderbolts* director and I’m not going to mention Thunderbolts* director because these movies don’t really have a director. They’ve got a Disney puppet who does what he or she is told and we should have no respect for him. Should we respect the cast? I’m having a hard time!

As Black Widow, Jr., or whoever, Florence P.U. acts her little heart out (and a little heart it surely is), and I applaud her talent and effort. But tragically, it’s fruitless, big picture; Flo’s fatally miscast because she’s such a squat-and-hobbity little thing, a blocky fire hydrant heroine tossed into a five alarm fire. I feel bad for her; teeny-tiny Florence P.U. tries so So SO hard, blubbering up all her shame and trauma and loneliness and alcoholism in an Oscar-worthy performance, summoning all the broken soul commiseration she can for modern-audience-Disney’s demo of Cat Lady Karens, while also kicking ass in fight sequences against big bad guys and other superheroes that are so hilariously absurd visually I was continually struggling to constrain and control cracking up obnoxiously while my nearby dulled-down Disney-fied filmgoers clung desperately to the most extreme outer fringes of suspended disbelief.

Look, no one would have ever cast Lawrence Olivier as Rambo, and if a studio tried, the film would’ve been mocked mercilessly, and deservedly so. Yet it’s considered poor form — or probably misogynistic (and maybe anti-midget?) — to point out that the primary character in Thunderbolts* is a horribly miscast joke, no matter how great an actress she is. Sorry, but if you can’t see that, or refuse to admit it, you need to uproot from the sparsely populated hinterlands of Kaelville and relocate into the far more densely populated urban region of Campealand.

Seriously, if you could imagine the tragedy/hilarity of what the great Kate Winslet’s career might have come to if she took a role like Black Widow, Jr., a genius turned into a mockery, that’s poor Ms. P.U. in this casting disaster. I repeatedly had to beat back and smother the urge to burst out laughing during scenes of unfortunate Florence’s ridiculous acrobatics and punching power, dominating groups of men two and three times her size — Primula Brandybuck as action heroine! — while at the same time admiring the soulful depths she seeks through her mentally damaged character’s dark memories and guilt.

Florence P.U. is terribly miscast but gives a great performance, as long as she’s not doing the things that you’d think would be the most important for her superheroine character to convincingly do. On the other hand, Elaine from Seinfeld is also terribly, horribly, no good, miscast while delivering a “you make me want to kill myself” performance as wicked CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who is a sexy and badass anti-heroine in some cool 1960s Marvel comic books created by gifted egomaniac and legit magician Jim Steranko, but on screen is yet another degraded Disney-fied dud, below a dud, really, and nothing like the character whose name she stole.

Elaine from Seinfeld as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine is even more miscast than poor Florence P.U., because she can’t do anything right; she’s both unfunny comic relief (in a movie that’s got too much humor already, or at least attempts at humor) and the most unthreatening yet irritating and unconvincing villain in lame comic book movie-dom we’ve ever seen. You couldn’t have miscast this role worse if you’d hired an aardvark.

Marvel Comics’ convincingly smart, sexy, formidable anti-heroine Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, created by Jim Steranko; and Elaine from Seinfeld as a cartoonish midwit, asexual, unthreatening villainous Disney character with the same name.

These are all ridiculous and eye-rolling characters, but Black Widow Jr. is both the unfortunate lead while also among the least interesting, glum and defeatist, and sort of a whiny self-centered know-it-all to boot. Which means another problem with this movie is that its central focus is wrong; the primary character should be the Winter Soldier, Captain America’s former sidekick-turned-incorruptible Congresscritter (and the guy who should be Captain America now, frankly, with the Falcon as partner, like a superhero Lethal Weapon — this isn’t hard, you idiots! The money’s just sitting there!).

But it’s not the Winter Soldier’s movie (because he’s a white guy?), and that probably explains the sullen, dispirited “I’d rather be somewhere else” performance from Sebastian Stan, the closest thing here to a real Movie Star (but not really, just the closest) yet who was much better in earlier Marvel films. He was also in that Disney+ series that shall not be named where Falcon couldn’t get a bank loan after saving the world. Glance, flush, repeat.

Also from that unspeakable Disney+ show that I cancelled after 20 minutes, Wyatt Russell is such a winning screen presence, like his dad, that he makes the other Captain America-lite (and even more asshole-ish) character 63% likable anyway; I’d certainly have rather spent more time with him than sulky fireplug girl. The afore-mentioned Ghost is another dull DEI-insert heroine I apparently didn’t remember from an Ant-Man movie that I’m pretty sure I saw; whatever, she didn’t annoy me. Interestingly, the wannabe Thunderbolt that I think is supposed to be the trans superthem dies early, and gets its corpse unceremoniously scavenged for guns and whatnot. That was funny.

The dialog is mostly comic book level when it isn’t bitchily PMS-ing. I don’t mean the former derogatorily, because some of it is fun, though it is waaaay too jokey in that Marvel cringe way, a cheap unnecessary laugh during a meaningful moment that more than half the time isn’t even funny. And it’s never any kind of hard-boiled masculine joking either, it’s all snippy middle-school girl talk, quips and shallow insults.

The script’s got moments when you can tell the Rat Kingdom is trying to have it all ways, but their heart’s not in it and of course they tip their paw, their animal instincts; the movie content product can’t escape Disney’s deadly never-ending injections-turned-infections of modern feminism into everything it touches, and modern feminism, at least as understood by Disney drones, is sad, broken, lonely, unloved and unfulfilled alcoholic white chicks who work too much and live too little. Disney corporate likes it that way, incidentally, because then those loser ladies keep sitting at home, sipping their cheap white wine and subscribing to Disney+.

Disney’s big bet on the bitter lonely unfulfilled white liberal cat lady demographic has proven a bold but incredibly stupid strategy.

There were maybe 30 people in my theater so I showed decorum, but if I wanted to, I could've let loose and happily howled with laughter during at least two sequences in the third act, just at the sheer wincing thud of preachy screenwriters + puppet director + rodent studio delivering such an overt “important” message about facing trauma and your dark side, as well as a harrowed Karen’s cri de cœur of the early 21st Century’s soul-broken modern Anguished White Female Urban Liberal (AWFUL).

I mean, my dear God. Read that monologue from the movie atop this page, Black Widow, Jr.’s lament to her dad about her lousy lonely loser’s life. It stops the movie dead, a staggeringly self-centered, self-pitying moment — 10 of 55 words, or nearly 20%, are “I” or “me” — that is also the telling personification of the sinister solipsistic mind virus that reigns o’er the retarded Rat Kingdom, a middle school mentality of petty not-that-talented theater kids who’ve destroyed what was once the greatest entertainment entity in the history of mankind, along with definitely murdering one (“Star Wars Is Dead”) and maybe two (this Marvel puppy) additional iconic all-American I.P.s. Thanks, China! Can’t wait for Fantastic Four!

Thunderbolts* ends with the big reveal that the misfits are now public heroes, and deemed “The New Avengers” by Elaine from Seinfeld, all her previous crimes seemingly swept under the rug. We’re apparently going to have to suffer through even more movies with this 100% failure screen presence and character insult. Disney Marvel’s even jokily halfway-changed the name of the movie to “The New Avengers,” in a pretty good second-weekend marketing campaign that I suspect will nevertheless prove Too Late the Hero to salvage it from becoming Marvel’s latest money-loser.

But it’s not just money that’s being lost; it’s perspective. This godforsaken thing is, in the end, a really bad movie that’s got maybe three or four charms adorning a corpse. It fails in an excruciating yet hilariously bad way in the third act, and wasn’t nearly good enough in the highly flawed first two to amend for the finalé’s sins. The primary protagonist is an absurdist yet sad joke that not nearly enough people are recognizing as such, and the so-called villain is beyond pathetic, neither convincing nor threatening in the least.

I can’t believe I wrote this much about such an inconsequential bad movie, but when film critics I thought weren’t movie reviewers roll over and go belly-up for a two star movie at best — AT BEST — while conspicuously-by-its-absence ignoring the fatally miscast bleached blond pipsqueak punch line at its core, it gets my dander up. Not as bad as the Falcon not getting a bank loan, but close.

Ah well, O Hell. At least I gave my money to Jesus, not Bobby Igor’s dank Legions. Take that, Mephisto! And sorry, Florence P.U.; I do think you’re a great actress. But this movie clowns you. Do better! And Don’t Kill The Messenger.

Pardon me for continuing to harp on this, but can I please reiterate how “back in my day,” this ridiculous superhero team led front and center by a pipsqueak munchkin depressive would have been a parody poster for a fake futuristic feminist film that could never exist except now it does.