Marvel’s indie’ left turn is studio’s best work in years

It won’t single-handedly save the MCU but Thunderbolts*’ is a worthy antidote to superhero fatigue, while Another Simple Favour’ is a sequel too far. Words: Clarisse Loughrey

- Clarisse Loughrey

It’s hard not to be cynical about Marvel’s Thunderbolts*. The franchise, having muscled countless independent films out of cinema screens to make more room for its behemoths, now has the audacity to sell their latest instalment as a big-budgeted film with the “feel” of a low-budgeted one, releasing a trailer boasting about how many of its cast and crew have worked on projects released by the average cinephile’s favourite production company, A24. Even its official synopsis declares, with a wink and a nudge, that it’s come courtesy of “a crew of indie veterans who sold out”.

Then again, if you do hire the team behind Netflix’s razor-sharp comedy series Beef (director Jake Schreier, its creator Lee Sung Jin, and one of its writers, The Bear’s co-showrunner Joanna Calo), and actually allow them the space and tools to work – well, logically, you should end up with something fairly decent.

And, so, Thunderbolts* is good. Not “single-handedly save the Marvel cinematic universe” good, but enough to make those self-declared victims of “superhero fatigue” reconsider that it might not be the genre itself that’s tapped out, but merely the focus on telling stories versus marketing future sequels and the sickly shimmer of nostalgia.

For those unacquainted with the comics, Thunderbolts*, at first, bears the distinctive afterscent of James Gunn, who closed out his Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy two years ago and then switched teams to head up the rival DC universe. It assembles an ill-matched squad of antiheroes, here all selected from previous Marvel films: Black Widow’s Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), and Red Guardian (David Harbour); franchise mainstay Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan); The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s John Walker (Wyatt Russell); and Ant-Man and the Wasp’s Ghost (Hannah JohnKamen).