Thunderbolts*

The Mild Bunch

Thunderbolts*
Directed by Jake Schreier
USA 2025
Marvel Disney
UK Cinema Release Print - IMAX version

Warning: Yeah, there’s some spoilerage here... big one at the end.

Thunderbolts* is the final part of Phase Five of the Marvel Cinematic universe and it’s almost but, not quite, a good film too. This one involves straggling characters from previous films and TV shows coming together to form a ‘rag tag’ group of C-list Marvels going up against a larger power and, ultimately, winning the day... in a fashion.

So we have the brilliant Florence Pugh being interesting as ex-Black Widow Yelena (sister of Natasha), David Harbour returning as her father, the hilarious Red Guardian, Sebastian Stan back as main staple character Bucky Barnes (still a million miles away from the Bucky I know from the comics but a pretty good character and actor, nonetheless), Wyatt Russell (son of Kurt) as failed Captain America substitute gone rogue American Agent, Olga Kurylenko as Taskmaster (also from Black Widow, reviewed here and Hannah John-Kamen as Ava Starr (from Ant-Man And The Wasp, reviewed here). All working for and against (it gets blurry) the MCU TV and movie character Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

And I’m telling you now, don’t get too attached to these characters until half an hour has passed because the one I was most interested in seeing developed as a character gets killed very early in the film (I won’t reveal who here, though)*. We also have, spoiler alert, Lewis Pullman playing Bob (aka The Sentry and The Void)... I’ve not read any of the comics of this character so can’t tell you if he’s a good version of him or not.

What I can tell you is that I was really engaged with this movie and having a good time for the first three quarters... which involved setting up the characters, trapping them all in an armoured bunker and following them as they escape and make their way back to New York for a final reckoning. Alas, the last quarter of the movie seemed pretty dire to me and really took the wind out of my sails. As soon as they’re back in New York, things got both ridiculous and dull. For me anyway.

So, I didn’t quite like this as much as the last Marvel movie, Captain America - Brave New World (reviewed here) but I do like the characters better. Although, it has to be said, the dialogue writing on this  was not a patch on any of their previous appearances.

There are a couple of problems with it.

For instance, the film starts out with Florence Pugh jumping off the second tallest building in the world and she fought to do this sequence for real herself (pulling a page from Tom Cruise’s book) and, yeah, she really does it. The down side is that I’m telling you this because, if you didn’t know this, you wouldn’t have been able to tell. It looks like a stunt double doing it due to the way it’s cut and lack of close ups on her face. If you’re going to throw your lead actress off such a tall building for a movie, then you might as well shoot it to make it recognisable as such, no?

Another thing is that, while it has a nice gritty aesthetic for the majority of the movie, there’s a certain point... a big battle scene where we first meet The Sentry in his ridiculous costume... where the aesthetic is just clashing with the action on screen. The result was... and to be fair I would have thought of this no matter how the rest of the movie was filmed... I sat there in the cinema thinking, for a good few minutes, that I was watching Superman IV - The Quest For Peace. Honestly, The Sentry to me just looked like Nuclear Man from that unfortunate movie. It popped me right out of the film and I had a hard time climbing back into it. It also didn’t help that the resolution of the film reminded me of Ang Lee’s muddled ending of Hulk. It’s all about fighting your inner demons folks, right? A more philosophically based internal battle was not the conclusion this movie needed. At least, I didn’t think it worked that well.

Now, one of the things the trailers and even the IMAX countdown opening were pushing was the next movie in the MCU (which comes out in a couple of months)... and there are two post credits scenes in this one. All I’m saying is, if you want to be surprised by the second one then, seriously, don’t look at the music credits on this movie (it’s a complete spoiler). What it also does, in my opinion, is take the wind out of the sails of the reveal of the time period of the next movie by throwing out the term ‘interdimensional’. I mean, I expected the next movie would be a multiverse movie anyway (and the trailers look terrible) but this is pretty much confirmed here.

Finally, you’ll notice that the title of Thunderbolts* has an asterisk on it. Now I’m sure there must have been some people wondering what this means but, I’m sure there must have been as many people thinking... “no, please don’t do the obvious here because this would be such bad news for the franchise". But, yes, they totally go there with the whole asterisk thing and, well, it kind of takes away hope for decent screen time for certain returning characters in future installments, in a way. All I’m saying is... I'm guessing Purdey and Gambit will not be turning up in the future of the franchise (and if you’re British you’ll probably know exactly what I’m saying here).

And that concludes my review of Thunderbolts*. Starts off good, continues that way for a while... has a terrible last act. But it was nice seeing Yelena and Red Guardian again... although there seems to be no explanation for the absence of Rachel Weisz here (did I miss something in a TV show?).

*Although it’s not stopped the marketing team from adding that character into a scene that doesn’t include said person for some of the publicity shots... see above.

Resident Evil - Welcome To Racoon City

Valentine’s Knight

Resident Evil
Welcome To Racoon City
Germany/Canada 2021
Directed by Johannes Roberts
Sony Pictures

I’ve got quite a lot of time for the previous live action franchise based on the Resident Evil computer games, I have to say. However, they’re not sacred to me, perhaps primarily because they let me down somewhat. The second of the six was quite disappointing but the third, fourth and fifth ones were all, like the original movie, way better than that. Alas, the sixth and final one was a real franchise killer in that the plot twist, which would have been obvious in any film to spot, completely betrayed the continuity of the preceding five films and basically contradicted the motivation behind the events of the second movie. Thereby rendering both it and the whole franchise suddenly useless and nonsensical. Yeah, I think there are a lot of fans of the franchise that went completely nuts at how bizarrely, badly written the storyline of the sixth part was. You can read my reviews of those original six films here, here, here and here.

So, it’s time for a reboot with Resident Evil - Welcome To Racooon City. A reboot that was announced, I should probably add, while the sixth film was still playing in cinemas. So, yeah... I guess they knew it was a franchise killer even then.  

With this one, director Johannes Roberts takes it back to the roots of the game. As in, it’s a return to the horror elements that the early games in the series on which this was based are best known for. The original film series had taken a few key elements from the original stories in the games, kept the zombie body count element and then pushed it to its logical point... or rather, one of a couple of logical points. That is, it turned it into very much an action franchise with big guns and explosions and a few added horror elements. And I was fine with that and I guess a lot of other people must have been also... considering it ran for six movies.

With Welcome To Racoon City though, while there are certainly some big explosions and scenes of rat-a-tat-tat gunplay, for sure, it’s mainly not an action picture. Instead, the director slows things down and moves the camera around in a more exploratory manner, allowing the creepy atmosphere of a mostly deserted city (more like a small town, actually, I would say) to come forth. This one is obviously based on the first two games and, as such (and almost coincidentally, it seems to me), it also takes elements from the first two movies. So, the mansion house which leads into the underground Umbrella Corp complex is included, mostly in the final third of the picture and there’s a lot of just trying to survive the decaying town of Racoon City, as the population slowly ‘go zombie’ with the T-virus they’ve been infected with.

The cast of characters including many favourites from the various games such as Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen), Chris Redfield (Robbie Amell), Claire Redfield (played by one of my favourite up and coming genre actresses Kaya Scodelario), Wesker (Tom Hopper) and Leon Kenedy (Avan Jogia) are all cool and have good chemistry together, I think. Also, the creature effects in this one are handled a lot better than in, say, the second Resident Evil movie, where one of the big ‘man in suit’ creations was a huge let down.

And there’s some nice cinematography with some much brighter colours which really work in the darkness (the film is pretty much all set over one night) with occasional more subtle palettes sneaking in if a scene calls for it. This is coupled with some slower paced, leisurely camera movement and a director and DP who know how to calm things down to not break the atmosphere. For instance, sometimes they will wait for a character who is out of focus to wander into the focus of a shot rather than bring the camera in straight away to sharp focus on them, which is nice. Also, the use of verticals to separate screen elements is something this director uses from time to time with a nice bold choice of leaving two thirds of the frame in darkness around a doorway, for example, to focus the collective eye of the audience where he wants it, by deliberately withholding the detail of the periphery. Nice.

Another thing he does... and I personally first became conscious of this technique when I first saw Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho... is to give time checks to the audience with some very specific times as the movie progresses. There are a few reasons for this kind of tactic but the documentary feel that Hitchcock was going for is definitely one of them. By that I mean that telling us the time is 11.17pm subconsciously fixes the time frame in your head as being something real and therefore more believable, because, otherwise, you’d round it up every time, right? The other thing this does in this specific film is ratchet up the tension because it’s established fairly early on in the picture that the Umbrella Corporation are going to destroy both their old labs and the entire town at 6am the next day. So, yeah, we keep getting time checks until, the last one of 5.59am suddenly ticks over on screen to the 6am deadline.

And, yeah, it all works. It’s not exactly a scary film but it is genuinely much more atmospheric than the previous films in the first series and it also brings in little elements from the early games like the zombie crows, which is nice. It’s also nice that it’s set on the 30th of September 1998, which is the same year I think the original game was first launched (I had a Playstation version of... I think it was Resident Evil 2 but, I wasn’t much good at solving the puzzles and got frustrated at the limited ammunition they gave you to get past zombies with). So there’s some nice moments of ‘old school’ technology such as Claire Redfield using a VHS machine or nice touches of humour when her brother asks her, “What the fuck’s a chat room?”.

And I have to say, although I don’t think it did very well at cinemas (well, gee, I guess you shouldn’t have released it during a pandemic guys... maybe just stop releasing films for five years until we’re out of this, the audience will still be there, if they didn’t die from the real life C Virus), I'd have to conclude that I really had a good time with Resident Evil - Welcome To Racoon City and I would certainly be up for a couple of sequels if somebody would green light those please. My only two complaints are that, a couple of the screen transitions seemed a little sloppy on their timing and, well, good lord people, how long does it take for a crack police team to realise you have to shoot a zombie in the head to kill it. Apparently forever, if you go by most of the characters here. But, yeah, those minor grumbles aside, I thought this slow burn of a movie was pretty great and a refreshing spin on the Resident Evil live action franchise. Fingers crossed for a sequel.

Ant-Man and the Wasp

Anty Hero

Ant-Man and the Wasp
2018 USA Directed by Peyton Reed
UK cinema release print.

So... hot on the heels of Avengers - Infinity War (reviewed here) we have the new Ant-Man movie kinda filling in on what was happening to this character just before the events depicted therein (for most of the movie... aside from two post-credits scenes here).
 
Ant-Man And The Wasp reunites Paul Rudd as the Scott Lang version of Ant-Man/Giant Man with Evangeline Lily as the Hope Van Dyne version of The Wasp. We also continue to catch up with both the original Hank Pym incarnation of Ant-Man, played once again by Michael Douglas... and the three ‘crooks turned honest businessmen’ friends of Scott, highlighting Michael Peña’s character Luis front and centre.

We also get a few new villains played by Walton Goggins as a business tycoon who was a character from the Iron Man comics and also, another character from Iron Man, The Ghost, is the main super powered problem for our intrepid hero’s here... although curiously, the character has had a sex change and is played by Hannah John-Kamen. That being said, she’s one of the most compelling and interesting characters in the movie so I had a good time with her here. Two other old school Marvel superheroes also, technically, make their first and second cinematic appearances...

First up we have Lawrence Fishburne playing the original Black Goliath, although he’s never referred to that on screen, only by his secret identity. Secondly, we have Michelle Pfeiffer playing the original Janet Van Dyme version of The Wasp. It has to be said she looks nothing like the original character (although, strangely, Evangeline Lily really does) but she does a really good job with the small amounts of screen time she has in this and brings a much needed gravitas to certain sections of the film.

Okay, so I didn’t enjoy the first movie all that much the first time around... although it kinda grew on me a little later. I did, however, enjoy Scott Lang’s appearance in Captain America - Civil War (although I liked that movie less than many of the others... my review here) and it’s the events of that film which lead to the set up in this one. After the ‘happy ending’ of Ant-Man (reviewed here), Scott Lang is no longer on speaking terms with Hope and Hank. Sure, he’s just about to end his two year house arrest and is not allowed to be speaking to them anyway, as they are wanted fugitives since Scott used the Ant-Man costume to help ‘Team Cap’ in Civil War. However, due to those events, they have fallen out anyway but, luckily, a certain incident from the first movie, where Scott visited the Microverse (sadly without finding any of the Micronauts), means they actually need certain information inside Scott’s head so they abduct him to help while an ‘ant’ covers for him wearing the security tag the FBI have put on him.

And then things escalate really quickly as the various characters I mentioned above start to appear and... well never mind quantum entanglement... everybody is getting tangled up in this adventure which has a fast pace and is hugely entertaining. In keeping with the characters, the film focuses a little more on the humour in various situations than the majority of the Marvel movies of late and when you inject that into some quite well choreographed action sequences where various vehicles, people and everyday household objects are shrunk or grown to giant size at the flick of a switch, the film just keeps buzzing along without ever really getting dull or outstaying its welcome.

Pretty much all the performances are fantastic and we also have Christophe Beck returning to composing duties although, and this is a really bad move again from Marvel, you can only get this thing as an electronic download rather than on a proper CD with a high quality recording (so they’ve lost this soundtrack buying customer with this poor decision).

Now when it comes to the ‘shrunken houses’ which Hank and Hope lug around with them... well first of all I will say that if you look around at various little characteristics of this, you’ll realise that it’s an expanded model rather than a shrunken building. This doesn’t, however, explain why you can just cart it around with you wherever you go without having the plumbing fixed up and electricity working. Nice idea but credibility is out the window here (as much as it could be when we have characters who can survive being shrunk and expanded at a fast rate without any lasting physical side effects to their well being).

Now, one thing I was disappointed with is in the differences between the trailers and the final presentation of the film. At least three of my favourite trailer moments never made it into the final cut of the movie and this is somewhat unfortunate. Maybe film companies should hold up on constantly promoting upcoming releases so early and instead wait around a few more months until they know roughly what footage from the final movie they have to play around with. I was waiting for lines and scenes which didn’t drop and this can be frustrating when you’re viewing a film for the first time.

The other thing is there are no great revelations in this one. My cousin in Australia saw this a few weeks ago and I pretty much described to him my predictions for the mid/end credits scene because it just seemed so obvious to me what was going to happen. Sure enough, the one thing you are expecting to happen here, if you’ve been keeping up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, does. However, even the obvious ending (which I won’t spoil here for you but I suspect most of you will have figured it out long before you sit down to watch this one) is tempered with a certain amount of tension because, ‘the thing that happens” comes at the actual worst time it could for these characters and gives a little more of a cliff hanger than the audience might have been expecting here (or at least, it did for this audience member).

The really nice thing about this movie, though, is that the main problem of the story is not conquered by opposition but by the spirit of camaraderie and kindness. Apart from Walton Goggins, all the other characters who take the darker route in this film are never portrayed as anything other than complex shades of grey and the denouement of certain situations, before the two post credit scenes, is pretty well put together and went exactly where I was hoping they would go. I think between The Ghost, Thanos and another character from this I won’t mention, Marvel are getting much more out of their villains than pretty much anyone else and they are not there purely to be just another antagonistic force anymore. So well done to Marvel for making this work.

And that’s me done on this one. Not much else to say here. A sequel which is certainly respectful to the first film in the franchise and I sincerely hope a third installment is on the cards. One of the post credits scenes gets a bit like a certain end scene in the 1980’s Flash Gordon movie and this tries to, by way of homage (I suspect), cast doubts on whether there will be another chapter in the saga. I’m pretty sure we’ll be seeing more of this crew in the next Avengers movie, to be fair. One last thing though... very well done to the writers/director etc for the very last, post credits scene. Here, we have a potentially hilarious scene showing something quite fun but, because of events witnessed and a chilling message on a TV screen, the whole last moments of the film are a truly interesting juxtaposition of humour and post-apocalyptic terror, so to speak (you’ll know what I’m talking about once you’ve seen the film... if there’s anyone left still to see it after it got a, bizarrely, very delayed release in the UK). Kinda looking forward to seeing how the next year of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is handled because... well, I think it will be an interesting one, whether the films work tonally or not. As for Ant-Man And The Wasp... a huge slice of fun. Go see it.