@MrMoKelly & The Rahner Report

now a freshman congressman. In the movie, as it starts at Sebastian stan Yolena Belova, a black widow, sister of the Scarlett Johansson Natasha, black widow who got killed a few movies back. That's Florence Pugh, her Russian father, the Red Guardian. That's David Harbor from Stranger Things. He's the buffoonish gung ho comic relief in the movie. Also, most things just sound funnier with a Russian or Eastern European accent.

Try it, I promise is good potato. There's John Walker, the disgraced ex brief Captain America replacement played by Wyatt Russell. He's kind of an exasperated a hole with none of the nobility that Chris Evans is Captain America radiated, and he seems to know it. Ghost played by Hannah John Kayman. She was an ant man in The Wasp, kind of

the least memorable of the villain heroes. Here, she can turn invisible and phase through stuff, but she levels up a bit and has some good dialogue and some action moments. There's also a dorky guy named Bob played by Lewis Pullman, the son of Bill Pullman. He was in a pretty watchable remake of Stephen King Salem's Lot recently, and Bob has some issues that are going to turn into a

major problem for everyone. There's Julia Louis Dreyfus. She returns as Valentina Allegrid de Fontaine, the unscrupulous manipulator from other Marble stuff. She's running the CIA now and facing impeachment hearings while she does more super manipulating, in this case trying to get all the loser semi heroes to off each other at first, and cultivating another super being who's more of a badass than all of them put together,

and who's also really unstable. You could spend some quality nerd time going down the list of who you would like to be on the team. I kind of wish they'd brought in Zemo. Maybe it was just the scene of him dancing, but I've been on teams Zimo since the Falcon and the Winter Soldier series, and just to be clear, Zemo dancing righteous dance off at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy cringe, awful, terrible. Marvel's been hit and miss, especially recently, but Thunderbolts is no thor

Love and Thunder or shang Chi or Wakanda Forever. It's lots of fun and it nails this mix of comedy and action that Marvel does best. The dialogue of all these misfits you have to work together's funny. The action scenes are well done, especially at the start of the movie with Yolena just plowing through a bunch of bad guys. They give Winter Soldier a supremely cool entrance on a motorcycle. After things have gotten going. That'll just make you wish he had a whole movie of his own. Ghost not

so much. The director is Jake Shreyer, who's maybe known for the Netflix mini series Beef to the extent he's known at all to normal civilians. This is a huge leveling up for him, and I think he's going to be around for a while. The movie starts off with what seemed to me like a really sloppy bit of plotting. These super losers are initially all sent separately to a facility to kill each other by Valentina, which of course they don't do. This is some sub James Bond foolishness.

Let me tie you to this chair and leave you unsupervised in this room. Nope, let's set them all up to fight and assume none of them will talk at all, say a word. I think the climactic segment of the movie is going to be polarizing, and I can't go into much detail about that without spoiling it. It wraps up the theme at the beginning of having to do with Elena the black widow, finding life meaningless and full

of painful memories of things she's done. But the movie takes this left turn from the kind of super action you might expect into some arguably cheesy territory. It's not enough to ruin the movie, but you might find yourself sitting there thinking, Hey, did they really just solve that by doing that?

I'm going to say about Thunderbolts. One more quick bit of a nerd business. You probably never got around to seeing Hellboy the Crooked Man because almost no one did. It was the fourth film in the series with the third actor playing hell Boy, barely released in theaters, made a lot of two million bucks on a twenty million dollar budget, essentially dumped straight to vod I don't know why, and it is by far the best of the four.

I don't understand why nobody's been talking about it, except that maybe people avoided it because it seemed like a failure, and that created kind of a fail spiral of avoidance. It's darker, much closer to the comics by Mike Manola, stays in the folk horror monster territory of his stories, and he co wrote it from one of his comic book stories. I caught it on Hulu and I've read

that it's doing well there. I will say, Hellboy the Crooked Man is slightly cheaper, looking kind of like a CW show, and doesn't have the directing flare of the first two movies by Guerramo del Toro, but don't let that put you off. It's still better than both of his And between those two movies, Thunderbolts and hell Boy the Crooked Man, that's a few solid hours of nerd time that you could have spent knowing the touch of a woman mo the touch of a week.