I didn’t think she was outright villainous until this movie. Before this she just seemed like an even more hard ass Nick Fury type but Nick actually cares about the people who work for him and does his best to look out for them and she does not. They are just tools to her. Here it was pure black hat.
She originally appeared in comic books in 1967. As with any character that’s been around that long her history is…complicated. I think she’s been a villain for about 20 years. I know the movies and books are separate and don’t have to match up but to comic book fans it’s not a surprise that she is a bad guy.
Yeah I don’t know Marvel comics as well as DC, I was just going by her handful of MCU appearances (most of which are just post credit tags so there really isn’t much).
The one thing about the movie I didn’t like about the movies was that Valentina survived. She was a smug phony and a horrible person who was responsible for any number of deaths; she should have ended up in prison, or preferably dead.
I agree, and the fact that the good guys let her get away with everything just so they could be the “new Avengers” was pretty lame. Only real complaint about the movie.
You might be forgetting (or didn’t catch) when Yelena whispered to her, “We own you.”
They’re 100% using her and it was implied that they now have the power in the relationship. Given that I find their acceptance of the situation totally plausible.
But that’s not punishment, she just gets to quit being evil. If anything she gets all the kudos from forming the avengers.
They aren’t punishing her. They’re using her. None of the Thunderbolts are typical hero types. They all have skeletons in their closets. I’m sure they enjoy turning the tables on her and for once making her their peon.
I mean, I get why you’re dissatisfied with the conclusion. The bad guy got away with it. But the Thunderbolts aren’t the Avengers (regardless of what their PR says) and I think it’s totally in-character and fit the story for it to conclude the way it did.
I don’t expect Marvel’s version of the Suicide Squad to conclude with a clean victory over evil. For me that would have been a disappointment actually.
I had the same feeling. I looked her up during the credits. I recognized her because she played opposite Daniel Radcliffe in Miracle Workers.
I never watched Miracle Workers but I saw enough commercials for it that I recognized her.
Comic book readers know that Mel is really a supervillain named Screaming Mimi who will turn good guy and join the Thunderbolts as Songbird
How exactly do they “own” her? When they’ve given Valentina a couple of months to recover and begin rebuilding her secret organization, what keeps her from assigning some new assassins to kill off the group? Do they really expect that Valentina has changed her nature and will not work behind their backs to put herself back on top?
It doesn’t work for me. Can you see Steve Rogers deciding in Winter Soldier that it doesn’t really matter if Hydra is running things and he can work with them just like he worked with Shield? That the only difference between Nick Fury and Alexander Pierce is who is more effective?
The only way that works is if you accept the premise that everyone is inherently evil - in the words of the movie there are no good guys and bad guys just bad guys and other bad guys. In that case you might as well work for Valentina de Fontaine because Nick Fury is really no better.
I realize there are people who believe that kind of bothsiderism - but I’m not one of them. So when a writer presents it as a fact in their fictional world, I see it as a flaw in the story.
Originally posted in the wrong thread:
If the Thunderbolts were now good guys, they should have turned on Valentina because she was a bad guy and it was the moral thing to do.
If the Thunderbolts were still bad guys, they should have turned on Valentina because she was a proven enemy who had repeatedly tried to kill them but was momentarily vulnerable.
Only if the Thunderbolts were idiots, should they have agreed to let Valentina go. And Yelena, at least, was not portrayed as that kind of idiot.
But even if they were idiots, there’s no way this plan would have worked. If they let Valentina go, she would have done the same thing she did the last time they were working for her; set them up to be killed because they were a threat to her.
The only way the New Avengers would still be around in fourteen months is if there was a missing mid-credit scene where a piece of debris fell on Valentina five minutes after the press conference and killed her.
Two ways. The primary way is the dirt they have on her that could get her stripped of her position and tossed in prison. But she also took credit for putting together a team of heroes as a savior to the world. If they said what really happened and refused to go along she’d have nothing.
That includes being responsible for the huge Sentinel mess.
And one of the Thunderbolts has political power and connections, so they really have the means to destroy her.
I don’t think she has the means to rebuild her organization. They’re all she has now.
The one quibble I have is that I don’t know what they’re actually getting from her. I do agree that without knowing what benefit they are getting from her, it’s difficult to judge whether it’s worth it to work with her. There wasn’t any time given to exposition at the end of the film, just a jump in time.
The thing they got from her is that they get to be the “New Avengers”, which apparently was enough for all of them to let her of the hook. Red Guardian and John Walker would have jumped at that, but not Bucky and probably not Yelena or Ghost.
You think she came across as a good guy in her other appearances? She certainly wasn’t played that way.
If Yelena had shot her in the head in front of all those reporters, shrugged and walked away, it would have made the movie one of my top-5 Marvel films.
Yelena wanted to do something other than being an assassin/thug for the government. I can tell she enjoyed saving people in NYC when Sentinel caused havoc. I don’t think it’s a stretch.
Ghost, who knows. She’s a bit inscrutable. She didn’t seem to have much of a motivation beyond maybe wanting a cure for her molecules falling apart or whatever.
Like you I don’t think Bucky would accept this at all. Especially since he and Sam Wilson are pretty close, and he was trying so hard to bring down Valentina. Maybe he sees himself as a way for the group to have oversight of some kind? But it’s still hard for me to buy it.
Wow, no, not at all. I think she has clearly been evil since the first moment she was on screen. Ridiculously so. She did everything but grow a moustache so she could twirl it.
Which was my point. The character is so blatantly over the top evil that she should never have risen to a position where she was a threat. Everyone can see she’s evil so why would anybody have given her any power?