Meh.

I have been hearing a lot of good buzz, and the trailer was edited by someone slightly more talented, or at least aware of a good story, than whoever has been producing most Marvel movies of the last few years. That trailer does a decent job of selling a movie about scrappy underdogs, in whom no one, not even themselves, really, believes, who see themselves as mere thugs doing dirty work, for a boss they don't morally respect, but who is the only one who will have them. And despite their differences and individual shortcomings, they somehow get it together and make their own thing worth fighting for. It's got a bunch of characters who have all at least been in movies before this one, and generally more than Hawkeye or Black Widow had before the first Avengers. The trailer showed them squabbling, crossing wires in the middle of fights, looking unimpressive riding in a car and getting attacked by Bucky and then all tied up as prisoners. Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, whose character name I have already forgotten, despite it being repeated for humorous effect in the film, scoffs at their potential as a team, a villain sneers at them, they suck. And Starship's "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" rises, the percussion part plays over a quick montage of the gang hitting people. We see a shot of something falling, with a couple of the gang trying to hold it up, keeping it from crushing someone, and the other teammates come in to help. The villain appears to be some sort of shadow force that turns people into black smudges, like those shadows of nuclear explosions, and Yelena walks into the shadow. There is also a shot of Bucky and some of the others walking determinedly, like, she had a hunch about fighting the darkness from within, and they're going to follow her, because they're a team now, damnit!

But, while music history is not my forte, I am pretty sure that "Starship" is Jefferson Airplane's sell-out version, and it would not surprise me to learn that their fans consider "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" (along with "We Built This City" ) as commercialized crap, the way Springsteen fans sneer at those whose ten favorite songs of the Boss are mostly from "Born in the USA" (Guilty! 8/10 for me! Basically, "Born to Run" & "Badlands" are the only other Springsteen offerings I like). And if 2010's MCU was Jefferson Airplane & Jefferson Starship, post-Avengers:Infinity War is definitely their Starship era. I know there are numbered phases, I don't know what they are, or which movies are part of which phases. I believe Thunderbolts* is supposed to end the current phase, and I get the impression Marvel is hoping to clear the decks and start fresh.

So, tortured metaphor aside, the film doesn't really deliver on the trailer. It's basically "Black Widow 2", sans Black Widow, of course. Scarlett Johansson, having "rejoined" her "fellow Avengers" solely to cut a cringe commercial for a Presidential campaign, is too busy latching on to the death spiral of an entirely different franchise to even put in an appearance in flashbacks or as a symbolic representation of anything. The main character is clearly Natasaha's sister, Yelena, and her primary relationship is with Aleksi, their exploiter foster father, who is basically just an awful person the writers of both his movies think they have concealed under layers of endless comedy. Both Aleksi & Yelena affect heavy Russian accents, even though their relationship (and the relationship with Natasha) is built entirely on their years together posing as an American family, in actual America, meaning there is no reason they can't, like Natasha, speak normally. And I think the reason for this is to hide the vapid content of their dialogue.

In the "Black Widow" movie, we learn the actually rather sad basis of the "family" of these characters. Back during the Cold War (or maybe not, pretty sure Florence Pugh, at least, was born after that was over, and Johansson was probably too young) Aleksi and Malina were a pair of Soviet spies inserted into the US in a deep cover assignment to infiltrate some project or other. They were given a pair of orphan girls to pass as their children, and pretended to be a normal American family until it was time for them to extract with the stolen research. Upon their return to Russia, the "parents" were reassigned and the girls, Natasha & Yelena dumped into the Black Widow training program. Years later, following the events of Captain America: Civil War, Natasha & Yelena, both of them renegade operatives of the Red Room - as the agency was known which employed female operatives known as "widows" - were investigating shenanigans of their former boss, encountered one another and renewed their fictive kinship. The trail they were following led them to break Aleksi out of a gulag, where he had been sent for reasons, despite having been transformed into a Soviet version of Captain America. I was never quite sure whether or not Aleksi has superpowers or enhanced abilities, and "Thunderbolts*" answers that question definitively, when he shields a child from falling concrete with his body, and the concrete shatters on his back with no discernable injury to him. They also ran down Malina and convinced her to turn against her boss, and they all teamed up to bring him down. It was weak and unsatisfying and the family arc felt forced an artificial, in large part due to what seems like a mandate to glorify the female, and only the female, characters. I assumed that at some point, we were going to get a revelation that the girls actually did have some importance to Aleksi, consistently portrayed as a vainglorious blowhard, whose priority was his career advancement and recognition as a hero. They kind of tried to do this with a mockery of a heartfelt conversation with Yelena which could just as easily be interpreted as an attempt to manipulate her feelings by recall happy memories from when they were playing a role he later abandoned without a backward glance. What I was expecting throughout "Black Widow" was the discovery that he was in the gulag for balking his superiors for the sake of the girls, that he tried to make contact with them, or get them out of the Red Room. Because that is really the only way to prove that they mattered more to him than his selfish desires. At the very least, it's something more tangible than "Hey, remember song you used to like? I do, which prove my affection, because otherwise is no way, I, trained KGB infiltrator, who spent years living fake backstory, would possibly be able to recall that fact, much less weaponize it to get you to accept me." But at least Aleksi is only dumb and selfish, and a willing agent of a monstrous tyrannical state not a hair more moral or forgivable than Nazi Germany, he at least cares a bit about Natasha & Yelena, when he can turn his mind away from his own interests for five seconds. Malina was actively evil and the brains behind enslavement & torture of innocent children and other war crimes (let's face it, given the 'attractive young woman' being the descriptor all the Red Room operatives, plus their being termed "widows" strongly implies they were prostituted as part of their training and operational methods), but all that is brushed under the rug and she is treated as a good guy, except actually allowed to be competent, and actually gets more acceptance and forgiveness from the girls than Aleksi does. For what it's worth, the other MCU properties ( "Wandavision" and "Agatha All Along" ) by the same screenwriter, Jac Shaeffer, suffer from a similar lack of moral compass, explicitly asserting female characters are good or heroic, even while they are shown acting in objectively evil fashion.

And that was the origin of Yelena, whom I will call Blonde Widow, and Aleksi, whose name was Red Guardian. We were shown Yelena mourning Natasha's death, and being recruited at her grave by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, just as John Walker was at the end of "Falcon and the Winter Soldier." Which segues into the tertiary lead of the film, Walker. Walker, in "Falcon & the Winter Soldier" after Sam Wilson rejected Captain America's appointment of himself as the inheritor of his shield and symbolic successor, was named the new Captain America by the government. Sam and Bucky treated him, and his sidekick Lamar, with utter contempt, as if he was some sort of poseur or committing an act of stolen valor, when we were shown that he was a legitimate war hero, who had his own doubts about his worthiness to fill Steve Rogers' shoes, but was trying to answer the call to duty. There was no arrogance on his part, and as he & Lamar, and Sam & Bucky separately investigated the threat, they legitimately made efforts to involve Steve's actual partners & friends. What the show seemed to believe was that Walker was acting entitled and his very act of approaching Bucky & Sam while calling himself Captain America, was a tacit usurpation and assumption of their loyalty as something he was owed along with his "stolen" shield. Walker was eventually motivated to use a serum designed to give people the same physical powers of Captain America, because the terrorists they were pursuing were already using it, and, again, he felt inadequate to the role he was being asked to play (and the utter refusal of Bucky and Sam to help, at all, almost certainly played a part). As I recall, there was possibly an issue affecting the behavior of the users, but that's something that never really gets follow up on. Walker is one of three characters in this film, with those sorts of enhancements, and the other two, Bucky & Aleksi actually discuss their use of the serum, with no such mention. The side effects seem to have been memory-holed in an effort to assign all the blame for everything to Walker, and not even willing to allow him the excuse of behavior-affecting drugs. Though the potential side-effects were used, IIRC, as a reason to criticize his decision to take the serum. Anyway, "Falcon & the Winter Soldier" believes that Walker committed crimes and brought shame to the title of Captain America, before Sam reclaimed and redeemed it, and spoke truth to power to the establishment and called out the powers that be for driving the villains to desperate measures. What we saw were a group of petulant, entitled zoomers who turned to terrorism, because they looted the possessions and property left behind by those who disappeared in "the Blip" and were irate at the prior owners having their property restored. These kids who grew up in the lustrum between the events of "Infinity War" & "Endgame" think they have a right to property and material provision they did nothing to earn, and so are going around attacking institutions and organizations that are trying to sort things out. Sending Walker, as Captain America, to Europe to fight these people (the organization they are targeting is led by a US Senator, so there IS a US government interest here) is denounced as an act of arrogance or world policing or whatever, making things worse. Meanwhile, Walker runs afoul of the royal guards of Wakanda who are pursuing Zemo across international and intercontinental boundaries, because Zemo's crimes on European soil, against international gatherings, included the death of the king of Wakanda, so Wakanda's interest is the only one that matters, and their desire to keep him imprisoned is a rightful act of national interest and not at all the same thing as the USA sending "Captain America" to stop attacks on US personnel & resources. One of them literally says that they have jurisdiction wherever they happen to be. And in the course of fighting these terrorists, after one of them, with superhuman strength, holds Walker's friend and partner, Lamar, pinned, another strikes a lethal blow, killing him. Walker pursues the killer, catches him, they fight, Walker gets the upper hand and beats him to death with the shield, but it's in public and there are a ton of cell phone videos taken of the incident, which is the means of Walker's disgrace and discharge as Captain America. This does not stop him from intervening in the final battle to save people's lives. And the show really thought that this was the power Walker stole corrupting him and this was supposed to be justice in the depiction of civilian bystanders capturing the abuse of power of a white, uniformed overreaching law enforcement member, brutalizing and killing an innocent suspect. What we actually were shown was an example of how a justified combat can be spun as a crime, thanks to partial video coverage, by amateurs and ignorant witnesses, with no context to understand his actions.

Yelena and Ava (Ghost, from the second of the three Ant-Man movies), on hearing John introduce himself in this movie, dismiss his resume with "and then you murdered an innocent man." Walker's only defense is to say "Define innocent" in a tone and manner suggesting he knows he has lost the argument and is simply offering a feeble and futile defense, when, in fact, he killed an armed combatant and guilty murderer in the heat of a fight (no super soldier actually can be disarmed, if they are strong enough to kill with a single barehanded blow, as Walker's opponent was, unless they are legitimately restrained, which he was not). Walker, like Bucky, has forgotten how to shave since "Falcon & the Winter Soldier" (despite Bucky being an actual congressman now), and he's all scummy and disreputable, and it's later revealed near the end of the movie that his wife has left him, due to his disgrace overwhelming him, so that when he is watching their child, from a foot away, with the child secure in a crib, he is looking at his phone, instead of the kid. It's possible that Walker did check out of his marriage to such a degree that his wife was justified, but they simply don't show this, they want us to take their word for it, when an equally valid interpretation is that she liked being the wife of a celebrity hero a lot more than she liked being the wife of a (wrongfully) disgraced and discarded scapegoat and bailed as selfishly as Aleksi forgot about "his" girls once the mission was over. Walker's demeanor is also 180 degrees different from his attitude on the show, and it seems like what they are going for is a sinner's redemption, rather than a wronged man finding acceptance and friendship with people who have something in common with him.

Then there is Ghost. Ava was, if you watching Ant-Man 2, afflicted by a science experiment gone wrong, rendering her body out of phase with reality. She was kept as a lab rat growing up, but eventually, a rogue scientist, and estranged partner of Hank Pym, Bill Foster, took her under his wing and devised temporary solutions to her problem, but the escalating nature of her condition and increasing desperation brought them into contact with the Ant-Man team as their own family project offered the only hope of a cure for Ava. They managed to achieve their own goal and also help Ava, and, presumably in a Disney+ show or some other work that slipped under my radar, Ava was recruited by Louis-Dreyfus. That's all. She is just in the film, and she is involved in fight scenes, and whenever it's convenient, the bad guys have a "sonic barrier" that renders inoperable her stealth and ability to pass through solid objects. She has zero character development, she has no arc, aside from joining in when the rest of the group do team stuff.

Also lacking a character arc is Bucky. As per the latest Captain America movie, actually featuring Falcon, rather than Captain America, Bucky is now a US Congressman. We don't know why. We don't know what motivated him to run, how he won. The other movie made a thing about all the superficial appearance attributes that Hollywood loves to pretend are essential or ideal for a politician (none of which have been possessed by the last three-four Presidents of the US), so I guess that's all we need to know about it. He has no staff, and the script treats Congress like an organization of which he is the newest employee. He attends a committee hearing, in which impeachment of the head of the CIA, Louis-Dreyfus, is being raised, for all sorts of shenanigans she got up to. Bucky decides to help by buttonholing her aide at a fundraiser and asking her flip on her boss. The head of the committee is not receptive to this and tells Bucky to trust to the formal process and let the impeachment committee take care of things. Bucky has an extraordinary, one might say, unbelievable, lack of faith in the system for a man not all that far removed from his decision to (successfully) run for Congress. He hasn't been in office long enough to even TRY, let alone fail, to make any changes or reforms. With that one rebuke stinging, and actually getting a tip from his newly recruited source, Bucky goes back into the field and joins up with the others. As with Ghost, there is no arc, just references to his past appearances in movies and shows (though, for an embittered jerk, whose malfeasance was partially exposed by Bucky, Walker seems awfully pleased to see him when he shows up). For some reason, Bucky is not the star or featured character of this movie, even though he has the longest, and most successful in the meta sense, history of any of the characters. Yelena (and Aleksi) was in a single movie, and that one rather a flop, to the degree that its star, playing the title role, Johansson sued, because a cut of the box office was apparently supposed to be a large part of her compensation, and the film's ticket sales turned out to not be so lucrative. Bucky, meanwhile, was in all four Captain America movies, playing a major role in two of them, and a couple of Avengers films to boot. Arguably, in a narrative sense, he should have been the successor to Steve, if we are going to look at Captain America as a job, and not a person. But nope, it's Yelena, and even the movie title and team name (the asterisk and a diegetic argument suggests "Thunderbolts" is unofficial, but the formal in-universe name of the team would probably not be any more pleasing to the fanbase than Sam was as Captain America) comes from her childhood.

The most significant character in the movie, aside from Yelena, seems to be Bob, a patient/victim of superhero experiments the gang stumbles across while nosing around in Louis-Dreyfus' dirty laundry, and I don't think it's a spoiler to anyone who saw the trailers, to say that he has some sort of connection to the shadow entity that seems to be the main threat.

Speaking of the main threat, the film makes a legitimate effort to tie it to the characterization of the heroes, and the implied thread they have in common - their past traumas and guilt eating them alive, which the threat turns somewhat literal, but they do none of the legwork to actually tie this in to anyone besides Yelena and to a smaller degree, Walker. There is some lip service suggesting Ava has issues, but her criminal actions in the past were all part of a desperate bid for survival. Meanwhile, Yelena, Bucky & Taskmaster were all mind-controlled or coerced as children (or both) into their wrongdoings, so the suggestions of a redemption arc don't really land. Aleksi is simply not believable as a trauma survivor, given all his characterization in both movies, but as noted above, they don't really try. As in the last one, he is mostly comic relief, except for a single speech to Yelena that carries far more weight than it should. FatWS tried to have Bucky dealing with the guilt for the murders he committed in his brainwashed state, but that singularly clueless show seemed to regard his innocence as a technicality, when in fact, that actually applies more to his guilt. Of course, the show also condemned Walker for basically the act of usurping Sam's title as Captain America, while also making Bucky apologize for his role in Steve's offensive request of a Black Man to represent the USA (Don't tell him about the implications of his military service).

All in all, the plot isn't terrible, they just could not be bothered having more than one and a half character, or dealing with any of the others in ways that did not blatantly tie to the main one. It grossly exaggerates the culpability and wrongdoing of most of the characters in a fitful attempt at a redemption theme, while papering over that of the worst member of the team (for whom a case can be made that he's actually worse than the villain) with ham-fisted comedy and occasional sentiment. Frankly, in both movies, nothing about Aleksi's circumstances makes much sense, they just keep telling us that his situation is X because they think its funny.

Oh, and I mentioned Taskmaster above. I have now used her name more times than she has lines in the film. She's more of a prop than a character, and again, used exclusively to have parallels with Yelena.

There is also a mid-credit scene of Aleksi being Aleksi, and making you seriously question exactly what the writers think of him and why we are supposed to find it funny, and then an end credit scene that basically undermines everything the characters have achieved toward their material goals in the film, all to set up the next "phase" in the MCU.

SPOILER for the glorified commercial:

The "Thunderbolts" computer or alarm system or network notifications alerts them to a mysterious thing in space, or possibly the fact that all the sci-fi people, things and groups on Earth are detecting a mysterious thing in space, which one of Our Heroes describes as a "cool ship" but which actually looks like what the 1950s or 60s thought would be a cool spaceship design, and it has the Fantastic Four logo on it.

What this seems to suggest is that the Fantastic Four actually fail in their efforts to stop whatever threat is menacing their world in the trailer for their new movie, and so they pull a Rick and Morty and bail to another dimension, bringing Doom with them, so they have to make amends, I guess?