Don (2006)

Phase 5 of the Marvel cinematic universe has been off to a rough start, seemingly struggling to find its footing. It's pleasantly surprising, then, to see that the most recent edition Thunderbolts* is an astounding exception, reintroducing the spirit that the franchise has lacked since Endgame back in 2019.

The movie opens in Malaysia where Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), a very familiar face for those who have watched Black Widow, has been sent to destroy records in a cleanup operation. It’s revealed that Yelena is acting under direct orders of the CIA director, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus)—who now faces impeachment for her relations with the O.X.E. Group—in her scramble to prevent Congress from finding evidence against her. When the committee continues the impeachment process, de Fontaine separately sends all of the mercenaries she’d hired to the same remote O.X.E. testing facility. Within the facility, Yelena, John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko), Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), and a seemingly random man named Bob (Lewis Pullman) who remembers nothing except having woken up in the facility, come face to face. During the ensuing scuffle, Antonia is killed, and the rest circle each other in a tense standoff as they come to a chilling realization—de Fontaine had sent them here to kill each other in her final step of erasing the evidence against her. As the facility is engulfed in flames in an effort to ensure their deaths, the mercenaries and Bob form an uneasy alliance to escape.