“Thunderbolts*” - Is that an asterisk in your title or are you just happy to see us?

Before I get into why Thunderbolts* is a movie you absolutely should see in theaters, the answer to your immediate question is I’m not entirely sure why the title has an asterisk. I have an idea though. Asterisks have a lot of different meanings and usages. Typically, asterisks are used to say there is a note at the bottom of the page or in the sidebar. But this is a movie - there is no bottom of the page or sidebar. In screenplays, asterisks usually denote revisions but can also signify scene changes or character actions. There is potential there, but does that mean the title is a revision? Nerds will point out an asterisk means multiplication in math and a wild card in computer programming. Thanks nerds, you’re definitely at the right movie.

Much like Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts* is an instance of the MCU telling a solid story while consolidating a bunch of threads from previous films and series. Thunderbolts* is a direct sequel to Black Widow, but also pulls in elements from Ant-Man and the Wasp, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Falcon and the Winter Soldier. If you were wondering whatever happened with Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), Red Guardian (David Harbour), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and Avengers Tower, you’re in luck.

Don’t worry if you haven’t seen any of those characters’ (or building’s) movies recently. Five of them are former villains or anti-heroes, de Fontaine is the director of the CIA and showed up in a bunch of mid/post-credit scenes, and Avengers Tower is still just a building in Manhattan. There, all caught up.

Now, de Fontaine employs Walker and the three women as off-the-books mercenaries...and Red Guardian runs a limo service. When de Fontaine is in danger of being impeached for running illegal operations, she sends the mercenaries to destroy any and all evidence, including people. In their final assignment, they are all sent to a mountain vault to kill each other, except none of them are aware that the others are all working for de Fontaine. After a very entertaining and humor-infused action scene, they discover a man named Bob (Lewis Pullman). Bob doesn’t know how he got there and doesn’t remember anything going back to when he volunteered for one of de Fontaine’s experiments. Once they realize de Fontaine wants them all dead, they are forced to work together to escape the vault before they are incinerated.

As it turns out, Bob was part of the Sentry program, the very program de Fontaine is under investigation for. When de Fontaine figures out who Bob is, she stops at nothing to capture him, knowing that the experiments worked. Inevitably, the cobbled together team of anti-heroes, which eventually brings in Red Guardian and newly minted Congressman Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), will have to face Bob. But it’s different than the usual superhero showdown we’ve grown accustomed to.

Another thing Thunderbolts* has in common with Brave New World is the stakes are much smaller than the entire world or galaxy or multi-verse. Nobody is trying to get their hands on a MacGuffin that can turn back time or erase half of life or is ten rings. It’s just the ragtag team vs. Bob, but mostly just trying to stop de Fontaine from corrupting Bob. And, as one of them points out, none of them really have any superpowers. Just a lot of training, tech, and serum-induced strength.

But the real meat of this movie, like all of the really good Marvel flicks, is the characters. If it isn’t already clear, all of them are damaged individuals. That’s how they ended up working for de Fontaine in the first place. The film establishes this is as the theme from its very first scene in which Yelena rotely executes a mission while lamenting that she is lost as a person. As the movie progresses, we learn that all of them are lost to some extent, even Bucky. Keeping the stakes to a minimum allows the film to focus on the characters’ personal struggles and how they steer them in their interactions with the group.

What I had kind of forgotten is how important the casting was to earlier Marvel successes. That’s not to say there have been any particularly bad casting choices, but how many nearly perfect choices there were. While everyone in this film gives really good performances, Harbour is fantastic, and Pugh is amazing. As with all MCU movies, comedic banter is found throughout (but it’s the right amount as opposed to Thor: Love and Thunder), but Harbour injects an earnestness and sincerity that makes it seem perfectly natural. Pugh balances the humor with a palpable sense of depression and desperation to find meaning in her life. She’s so good you’ll find yourself almost in tears at times. Over an assassin. It’s the kind of thing that’s been missing from most of the post-Endgame content, that “heart” that used to permeate earlier MCU films.

If Brave New World was a reset for the MCU (and I maintain it was a very solid reset), Thunderbolts* is very good start to the next phase of the MCU. And that asterisk? Well, the movie gives a very obvious, surface level answer. But I think it’s more than that. I think it’s a wink at us saying there’s more where this movie came from. Or to put it nerdily, it’s a wild card.

Rating: Worth your entire family seeing it, no asterisk needed.

“Dumb Money” - Cha-ching!

People love to fantasize about striking it rich in various ways. Winning the lottery, nailing the parlay at the track, becoming a YouTube star, or inheriting a fortune from cranky old Aunt Ethyl after she falls into a pile of fur coats and suffocates to death. What’s that? Aunt Ethyl is okay? Thank goodness.

Of all the various ways to get rich, playing the stock market might be the one people believe they have the best chance at. Like the recent explosion in legal sports gambling, investing in stocks has become radically easier thanks to the Internet. And, like all those other get-rich avenues (including good old-fashioned casinos), the stock market is rigged to favor the house. Oh sure, we the underdog have a chance to win it big, but that chance is tinier than Aunt Ethyl’s generosity.

In Dumb Money, Keith Gill (Paul Dano) is the underdog. Keith is a lower-middle-class financial analyst by day and a vlogging webcaster by night. Under the excellent monikers Roaring Kitty and DeepFuckingValue, Keith discusses his personal financial choices in YouTube videos and posts on a subreddit page called WallStreetBets. Believing that GameStop stock is undervalued and the company itself is worth investing in, Keith invests his life savings ($53,000) in the stock and posts a screenshot of his portfolio to prove to his viewers the investment is real. As the weeks and months go by, he continues to vlog about the stock’s progress, using his portfolio spreadsheets as the background in his videos to maintain credibility. And Keith’s investment risk is real, as his wife Caroline (Shailene Woodley) and baby are in this boat with him.

Meanwhile, the villains of the story are betting the opposite of Keith. Hedge fund managers Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) and Steve Cohen (Vincent D’Onofrio) have heavily invested in short sells of GameStop stock, believing the company is on the brink of bankruptcy. Plotkin and Cohen are always featured talking to each other on the phone while walking around their ostentatious mansions. Occasionally, another hedge fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin (Nick Offerman), will call in to offer smug support. Offerman-as-Griffin perfectly oozes contempt and condescension at his less-rich counterparts, but is willing to help them in the same way the witch is willing to help Hansel and Gretel.

Finally, we have the rest of the common folk, a.k.a. retail investors, derisively referred to as Dumb Money by the villains. The common folk are you and me and nurses and salesclerks and massively indebted college students (America Ferrera, Anthony Ramos, Myha’la Herrold, and Talia Ryder in this movie’s example) who have proverbial pennies to invest in the stock market. As Keith’s videos start to gain attention and new followers, the previously mentioned common folk invest what various amounts they can in GameStop stock, inspired by Keith’s easygoing honesty.

As Keith and company follow the slow, steady, upward climb of their stock, we are treated to updates to each person’s value. In an ingenious bit of inspiration, the film introduces every character we meet by giving us their name and net worth (in dollars) printed on screen, ranging from Keith’s solid $90,000 to Keith’s brother’s (Pete Davidson) dozens of dollars to the college students’ six-figure debts. The 99% of us can easily relate to those people. And we also get the same for the hedge fund managers, with their eight- and nine-figure fortunes. The 99% of us can easily hate those people.

In case you weren’t aware, Dumb Money is based on recent true events. While the common folk were invented for dramatic purposes, Keith and the hedge fund trio are actual people. As the stock price continued to climb and GameStop didn’t go bankrupt, the hedge fund managers started to panic about a “short squeeze.” In very basic terms, the hedge funds were all losing massive amounts of money while the commoners were actually realizing the American Dream. Adding to the story is that the investing turned into a cause. When the subreddit community realized that the rich hedge fund managers could just bail each other out, the community vowed to hang on to the stock and keep buying to drive the price ever further. The film does a great job of building the tension by bouncing between the various characters, making us wonder if the commoners are going to cash out and the hedge fund managers are going to go broke before the reality that rich people rarely ever lose comes crashing down on the community.

As good as the story is, the performances really make the film. While Dano does a decent job of delivering a protagonist that we can get behind, my favorite characters are the trio of hedge fund managers and the two college students. As much as I enjoyed Ferrera’s nurse and Ramos’ GameStop clerk, the two college students’ throwing caution to the wind was so much more fun to root for. Almost as much fun as rooting for Plotkin to end up under a pile of trash like the Duke brothers from Trading Places.

Perhaps the best aspect of the movie is that the filmmakers subtly make the film better by doing the opposite of a couple of things that normally make movies worse. One is that they open the film in a chaotic and off-putting way, using abrasive music and quickly jumping between a bunch of characters. They throw a bunch of dissonant stuff at us really quickly, practically daring us to walk out of the film before it’s even really started. The other is that most of the characters have almost no development beyond their name and net worth. Character development is usually key to get the audience to sympathize with characters. In this case, we need the commoners to stay common. Anything more and they might feel artificial, even special. That’s why showing us their names and net worth works so well - that’s all we need.

Despite knowing how the real-life story played out, I was still captured by the film. Why wouldn’t I be? I love an underdog story as much as anyone, especially one where the underdog has a chance to strike it rich. Just like me, if I can find a couple more fur coats to add to the pile.

Rating: Don’t ask for any money back because this investment was worth it.