As a Teen Boy Mom, I Got a Real Surprise Watching Thunderbolts*

In an effort to spend time with my teen son, I took him to see Thunderbolts, a film I had zero interest in seeing. I’m not a superhero film fan and I don’t especially like action movies. (I'm a 50-something woman, okay, I'd rather watch drama in the South of France for two hours.) But during this Marvel movie, I was electrified by the fast pace, action sequences and Florence Pugh's acting chops. I was also completely shocked by what the film reveals about the inner life of its target audience of teens and young men—reflected on screen by a new villain who is completely unlike any movie bad guy I’ve ever encountered before. Here’s why it’s been a real eye-opener for me, and in my opinion is required viewing for parents.

A quick recap of the story: We meet Yelena (Florence Pugh), a superhero-for-hire who’s bored with mercenary work. She is suicidally depressed, but decides to live after stopping by to see her estranged father, a retired superhero played by David Harbour. Yelena agrees to do one last government-ordered mission before quitting the merc biz forever. But when she’s sent to a top-secret experimental facility to kill a rogue agent, she meets a handful of other middle-rung superheros that have been sent to kill her, and each other. And everyone meets “Bob,” a shy guy who has survived the illegal experiments at the place and now just wants to escape…but is Bob all he seems?

Okay, so….a bunch of underdog good guys struggle against a wicked government official who seeks to control a lab-created bad guy as an evil-doing pawn? That’s about as groundbreaking as florals for spring. (Suicide Squad and Guardians of the Galaxy have covered similar ground.) What’s different here is the psychological makeup and destructive weapon of the main bad guy, Bob (aka Void in his transformed persona). He’s a character who personifies depression, hopelessness and isolation. (I’m not reaching to describe him this way—the director backs this up.) Bob grew more powerful the more hopelessness he verbalized, and I thought about how this villain was something new on the mass cultural landscape. I grew nostalgic for the more upbeat bad guys of yesteryear, like in Superman, when Lex Luthor wanted to take over the world. Or in the Batman saga, remember how Joker and Penguin wanted to commit crimes for profit, power or even for just for the bubbly, insanity-fueled fun of it?