That is a really common arc in comic books. How many times has Lex Luthor been President?
I think this is where I’m supposed to say it’s just a comic book movie. But really at this point it’s practically a documentary. Sure we see her behind the scenes ordering evil things but is her public persona any more evil than the current leadership? Have you seen the recent Kristi Noem testimony in front of Congress? I would rather have the contessa.
I’m aware that many of our current political leaders are on the side of evil. But my argument is that not all politicians are evil. Do you agree? Or do you feel that all politicians are evil?
If you agree that some politicians are good (in real life and in the Marvel universe) than why would Yelena and the rest of the team go along with leaving Valentina in power when they had the chance to remove her from power? Why not replace a known evil politician with a good politician?
Or putting aside the moral issue, there’s my other question. Why leave a person in a position of power when you know that person has used their power to try to kill you in the past? And has every reason to try to kill you again in the future? If I knew somebody was planning on killing me, I’d be happy to remove them from a position of power. Even if I was myself an evil person.
WE can see she is evil because we see the behind the scenes stuff. In public she’d just be another politician.
I had some problems with the ending too, though I found the film to be a lot of fun overall.
Leaving Valentina alive and in power would make a lot more sense if Bucky wasn’t part of the Thunderbolts. Even though the Thunderbolts are likeable and sympathetic, they are not particularly good people. They have enough dirt on Valentina to bring her down, but Valentina also has a lot of dirt on them. They are after all murderers, assassins and terrorists. It’s arguable whether they could negotiate for a full immunity for all their crimes in exchange for testifying against Valentina.
It wouldn’t be out of character for them to put their own self interest over bringing Valentina to justice. She did try to have them killed, but they also tried to kill each other, and were able to get over that. I could see a sort of villainous cease fire born out of mutual self-interest between Valentina and the Thunderbolts sans Bucky.
Bucky cheerleading all this makes very little sense considering his current position and past character development, though.
I don’t feel this is true. The first scene we saw her in was her impeachment hearing. Obviously she did not have a good public image.
Well other politicians would also know some of the behind the scenes stuff. They were having a hard time coming up with anything though.
Yeah, that’s my problem with this.
Honestly, I don’t really like Bucky as a member at all to be honest. As far as I know, Bucky hasn’t made a lot of bad decisions like the other Thunderbolts. He nearly died risking his life heroically in WW2, then was captured by the Soviets and brainwashed into a mind-controlled death machine. Despite the fact that he wasn’t in control of his bad behavior, he still went around and did everything he could to make amends for it all in Falcon and the Winter Soldier. So he’s not a shady anti-hero like the other people in the group, he’s a straight-up hero.
On top of that, he gets elected to the House of Representatives, and is trying to get Valentina impeached and have that info brought to light. He has a close relationship with Sam Wilson, as both of them were proteges of Steve Rogers and they bonded when they teamed up for a while after Steve passed the mantle of Captain America to Sam. Bucky appears briefly in the Brave New World film to show that he is still a friend and ally to Sam and to Joaquin Torres (the new Falcon). Presumably that’s still the case.
So he abandons his job in Congress, turns his back on his friend Sam, and joins a morally ambiguous group of anti-heroes in contrast to his own high standards of morality in order to work for a lady that he was trying so hard to bring down.
Bucky just doesn’t fit in with the group and it goes against his whole character to stick around with them. I think it would have been more consistent and more interesting if at the end of the movie (at least in the stinger) he is shown to be a regretful antagonist toward them.
Should have been Baron Zemo instead!
For multiple reasons yes.
? Do we know that Bucky is actually resigning from his Congressional position? Maybe he’s thinking of Thunderbolts as a kind of side hustle enabling him to keep a closer eye on what Valentina’s getting up to?
After all, even the original Avengers weren’t fighting crime and saving the galaxy all of the time. Isn’t Congress in session only about 15 days a month, anyway? Probably wouldn’t even have to miss too many floor votes.
I meant he abandoned his job as a Congressman by not taking down Valentina. As far as I know he’s still in office.
Oh, gotcha, sorry.
No, it was my fault for being unspecific.
Though he’s up for election every 2 years, I’m curious if he had to run again during the time jump. Imagine if he was warned that he needed to continue as a “New Avenger” to get reelected.
(In all seriousness, I don’t doubt he’d insist that Brooklyn is electing him to the House and not the Avengers and refuse those games.)
I guess I am in the minority here as not seeing Valentina as over the top evil. None of her previous appearances indicated as much and neither does this one. I see her as an ambitious person who has used political levers to gain power. Yes, she wants power and she has worked to develop some shady assets to do so. She also, like the other infamous baddie Thanos, is motivated by making the world, in her view, better. Though he had an end game and she does not.
As to Bucky joining the group, I see it as him wanting to keep an eye on them and make sure they behave. He also likely has some level of sympathy with the plight of the lot of them, having been brainwashed into doing things he did not want to. The others in the group were not brainwashed but in their own way were forced to do distasteful things.
//i\\
She used assassins to cover up her human experiments that ended up with every single subject dead except one then backstabbed all her people in order to cover her tracks…
That wasn’t his job. It was something he was doing outside the scope of his job. Wendell Pierce was on the committee looking into Valentina. Bucky the extremely junior congressman was not. Anything Bucky was doing was on his own.
Ask Taskmaster if she’s a villain. Oh wait she’s dead.
Boy did they butcher that character. I have a mint copy of the real Taskmaster’s first appearance. If they had done more with the character in the movies maybe it would have been worth more to me.
Killing her off might have been for the purpose of trying again later.