Film review: Thunderbolts* is a superhero movie that tries to do something different

Our heroes find themselves battling an insidious foe in Thunderbolts

Thunderbolts*

★★★★☆

You know things are getting grim out there when the superheroes are questioning their motivations.

Thunderbolts* (12A) opens with Yelena Belova, aka the Black Widow (Florence Pugh), in something of a funk, unfulfilled by killing bad guys at the behest of the OXE Group’s Valentina de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and looking for a way out.

As it happens, Valentia is only too happy to offer Yelena an exit: with the Avengers in a state of disarray, Valentina wants to mop up the few remaining superheroes — Yelena, the new Captain America (Wyatt Russell), the Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) — and replace them with the Sentry (Lewis Pullman), a single entity ‘stronger than a whole team of Avengers.’ 

But in corralling all her ‘defective losers’ into a vast incinerator and tasking them with annihilating one another, Valentina makes a fatal mistake: from a ragtag bunch of misfits she accidentally creates a crack team with a burning desire to stop the power-hungry Valentina in her tracks.

The asterisk in the title is to remind us the Thunderbolt collective only exists as a placeholder for the squeaky-clean Avengers, or at least until a better squad of square-jawed do-gooders comes along, but Thunderbolts* suggests that Jake Schrier’s take on the superhero flick is the way forward.

Yelena, Walker and the Ghost (who are joined by Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) and the Red Guardian (David Harbour)) might be a scruffy bunch of squabbling heroes, but there’s a rough charm to their many foibles and failings. 

Arguably the most interesting thing about Thunderbolts*, however, is that it’s a superhero movie that tries to do something different with the genre’s narrative arc, and particularly in the latter stages, which tend to be ploddingly predictable.

Here, and without giving away spoilers, our heroes find themselves battling an insidious foe that can’t be zapped, crunched or punched into orbit.

theatrical release

Amongst the Wolves

★★★☆☆

Amongst the Wolves (16s) stars Luke McQuillan as Danny, an ex-soldier living rough on Dublin’s streets.

Taking to the woods to avoid being hassled, Danny encounters the terrified teenager Will (Daniel Fee), who owes money to local drug kingpin Power (Aiden Gillen) and is living in fear of his life.

Danny has troubles of his own as he tries to maintain a relationship with his young son Tadgh (Manco O’Connor) despite his ex-wife Gill’s (Jade Jordan) opposition, but will his conscience allow him to walk away and leave Will to face the wolf pack alone?

Written by Luke McQuillan and Mark O’Connor, with O’Connor directing, Amongst the Wolves is a solid addition to the Irish crime thriller genre that’s at its most tense when it demonstrates how quickly the innocent can become collateral damage when criminal conflicts spiral out of control.

Aidan Gillen is reliably sinister and quietly manic as the gangster-in-chief, while McQuillan delivers a sturdy performance as the stoic, world-weary Danny.

theatrical release

Parthenope 

★★★☆☆

A love letter to Naples from one of its most famous sons, Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope (16s) stars Celeste Dalla Porta as the eponymous heroine, a young woman of ‘disruptive beauty’ born into gilded luxury in 1950.

‘I don’t know anything,’ declares Parthenope as she soaks up everything life has to offer, ‘but I like everything.’

A febrile summer on Capri aged 18 changes her life forever, however, when the sudden death of her beloved brother Sandrino (Dario Aita) casts a long shadow across Parthenope’s indolent existence, sending her off, as a student of anthropology, on an epic quest to discover meaning in academia, the world of cinema and Naples’ social whirl.

Sorrentino’s cameras fairly ravish Naples and Celeste Dalla Porta, whose Parthenope embodies the city’s many contradictions, but for all its shimmering elegance and sultry moods, the film is rather vacuous in its over-earnest attempts to intellectualise the love-hate relationship between Naples and its long-suffering citizenry.

theatrical release