Film reviews: Thunderbolts* | Parthenope

After 35 films and numerous TV shows, Thunderbolts* shows that the Marvel team still have it in them to surprise, writes Alistair Harkness

Thunderbolts* (12A) ★★★★

Parthenope (15) ★★★

Even for a studio synonymous with self-referential humour, the latest entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe comes so wrapped in quotation marks it risks deconstructing itself before it’s even told us what it is. But what’s surprising about Thunderbolts* (even its weirdly asterisked title has an ironic punchline), is how much this approach actually works. Rather than contenting itself with being a smart-aleck clone of last year’s ultra-meta Deadpool vs Wolverine, the film, directed by Jake Schreier (Robot & Frank), uses Marvel’s default sensibility as a bit of misdirection to guide us away from what’s really going on.

From left to right: Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), and Red Guardian/Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour) in Marvel Studios' Thunderbolts* | Courtesy of Marvel Studios

A team-up movie about a bunch of delinquent heroes who’ve struggled to fulfil their super-powered potential, part of the reason it works too is that for all its characters’ collective chat about their lowly status in the wider MCU, it doesn’t really require an in depth knowledge of the 35 previous films and many TV shows to get swept up in the action. Which isn’t to say it works as a stand-alone film. Returning characters from the likes of Black Widow and the TV shows such as The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Hawkeye might have you playing catch-up while the plot takes shape. Sometimes, though, having the right movie star is enough to tune you into this rolling superhero soap opera and, in this instance, Florence Pugh more than carries the film.

Reprising the role of Russian super-assassin Yolena Balova that she first played in Black Widow, the British star is a pretty magnetic presence, able to balance the light and dark of the character as she reckons with grief, trauma and the increasing job dissatisfaction of being a covert gun-for-hire whenever Julia Louis-Dreyfus' ridiculously named CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine needs a mess cleaned up.

Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) in Marvel Studios' Thunderbolts* | MARVEL STUDIOS

It’s on one such mission that she’s forced to team up with fellow black-ops agents John Walker (Wyatt Russell) — a “dime store Captain America” — and Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko) — a kind of human cyborg with shape-shifting abilities — when a double-cross results in all three facing certain death. The plot really gets going when they reluctantly join forces with Yolena’s ex-Russian superhero dad Red Guardian (David Harbour) and villain-turned-good-guy Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) to save the mysterious Bob (Lewis Pullman), the lone survivor of a failed medical experiment that de Fontaine is trying to keep quiet in the face of impeachment hearings.

Speaking of which, if said hearings feel like an on-the-nose nod to America’s current political woes, the film — which was actually due out last summer — accidentally delivers an even more on-point commentary when the twist kicks in and a literal darkness descends across New York, a development that takes the film in a surprisingly inventive direction, one that gives us a little bit of Marvel-style city-levelling chaos, but mostly seems to have been inspired by the end of Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. That’s all to the good, a reminder that the Marvel team still have it in them to surprise, even with their tongue lodged firmly in their cheek.

Celeste Dalla Porta in Parthenope | Contributed

Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, the dazzling visual stylist behind Oscar winner The Great Beauty, returns with Parthenope, another sumptuous exploration of youth, beauty and the spiritual malaise of his home country. Taking its title from the tragic Greek siren from whom Sorrentino’s home city of Naples took its original name, the film revolves around another siren named Parthenope, a young woman whose mythic beauty beguiles almost everyone she comes into contact with, including her mentally fragile older brother, whose incestuous attention will shape her bounteous life in ways she can’t anticipate.

Played by newcomer Celeste Dalla Porta, Parthenope ensorcels Sorrentino too — his camera swoons almost any time she’s on screen and the film’s obsession with exploring Parthenope’s disruptive beauty echoes, perhaps, his complicated feelings about his home city, itself a place of great aesthetic charm and mystique, but also riddled with crime, human suffering and — if you’ve seen his previous autobiographical film The Hand of God — great personal tragedy.

Quite what it all adds up to is harder to pin down. Scene to scene the film is outrageously grandiose as it follows Parthenope’s pursuit of acting and academia, divergent paths that take her on an almost Homeric adventure replete with a fantastically exotic cast of characters. These include a facially disfigured acting coach, a Camorra crime boss, a lecherous bishop, a curmudgeonly anthropology professor and, at one point, the American writer John Cheever, played here — with suitably rumpled sophistication — by Gary Oldman.

Yet its efforts to interrogate the emptiness inherent in such extravagance feels a bit rich given the extent to which the film relies on it to pull us along. That it does the latter is a testament to Sorrentino’s seductive image making, but the film’s inherent shallowness is underscored by an outré twist late on that proves curiously unmoving.

Thunderbolts* is in cinemas from 1 May; Parthenope is on selected release from 2 May

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