Thunderbolts*

Took me a bit too long to see this movie. Off the bat I want to say that I really enjoyed this movie. It managed to keep a well-balanced tone throughout without having its humorous moments knock it off course. It really felt like a smooth collaboration of all of these different characters that were set up in previous phases. Its characters were all written with the personalities and attitudes from their previous projects with that added tragedy that had brought them to be in this point and they all worked well being put into one project. That being said, there are quite a few things that knocked me from the opinion I’d seen shared by the majority. The film was set up as sort of an exploration of mental health difficulties for these characters, however I really didn’t feel that. The only time you get a sense of how messed up these characters are is when it’s directly mentioned in a scene. It was a lot of expositional trauma swapping that didn’t really lead to much other than establishing where their headspace is at any given moment. Also, one character that I felt was done dirty (other than Taskmaster) was Ghost. Her character had so much unexplored backstory that they could’ve dived into other than off-handed remarks about being trained by SHIELD. When she first appeared in Ant-Man and The Wasp, we see a brief glimpse of the accident that warped her where her parents died. This movie really could have explored how much the pain of her quantum sickness had defined most of her life and ambitions that now it’s gone, she feels lost, especially since she no longer has her father-figure, Bill Foster. Instead they gave us literally nothing but her presence. Still, it’s a great movie that was paced well and had an insane story that was managed to be reined in.