Goddamn, I love being wrong!
Highly trained assassin Yelena Belova must team up
with an unlikely group of deadly agents to take down Valentina Allegra De Fontaine and the immense power she wields.
Thunderbolts had the least-costumey Black Widow costume yet for Yelena. The Hawkeye version was dark, but still obviously constructed, and of course the Black Widow movie version was all kinds of fancy to lead into Endgame, but the Thunderbolts suit looks like she's just wearing coveralls from a garage. The sculpt is wild, though, with so many wrinkles it looks like it's made from nylon and she just stores it by wadding it up in a ball. Somebody clearly went into overtime sculpting all that! It does make sense for the character - she's dealing with depression and burnout, so she wouldn't really have the spoons to deal with finding an actual super-suit to wear - but it still more mundane than you expect from the MCU.
The figure's facial sculpt is very nice, but it just doesn't look like
Florence Pugh. Like, if you saw this sculpt, removed from the context of this body and without her Agent Helix hair, you wouldn't be able to guess who she was supposed to be. Truth be told, it looks more like Emilia Clarke than anyone else. You know, Secret Invasion's... I don't actually know the name of the character she played in Secret Invasion, Be honest: without looking it up, do you? It's G'iah. And this Yelena looks more like the character whose name you forgot than it does like the star of this movie.
The figure includes a pair of fists, and a pair of hands open to hold things. She's got a small pistol that goes in the holster on her right leg (and the holster itself is attached to both the leg and the belt, thanks to the miracle of flexible PVC that will still allow the joints to work), a knife that sheathes upside down right behind the butt of the gun, and a pair of fighting sticks that fit into loops on her back and poke up over her shoulders. Unfortunately, both hands are spaced to hold the pistol, which makes it difficult to hold the sticks, and nearly impossible to hold the knife. Kind of disappointing.
But hey, this is a two-pack, maybe the other half will be better?
Upon hearing of a dangerous new threat, Alexei Shostakov leaps at the opportunity to reclaim his glory days as the Red Guardian.
Red Guardian got not one but two Marvel Legends in the Black Widow line, which meants he wasn't a big selling point for this two-pack. So imagine my surprise when I snapped him out of the plastic tray and found that he's an entirely new sculpt! Okay, not "entirely" new, that's just what I thought as my first impression: the pelvis and the legs from the thigh joint down are reused, with the rest being new work (and even then, the legs have been remolded to make the knee hinges pinless). His costume is more like bodyarmor now, with the straps holding it on instead of just being decorative. Insstead of tall gloves to match his boots, he now just has fingerless gloves and large white cuffs. The shoulder pads are the style that turn freely, so the arms don't get blocked from any poses.
We get two heads for the figure, one wearing his helmet,
and one without. Those are the same kinds the last toy had, but they're both new sculpts: his helmet is a new design, so that couldn't be the existing mold, and his head is shaved, rather than having any hair above his beardline. It is kind of impressive that although we have three ML Red Guardians, they all depict him at different points in his life. For the best sense of depth, the helmet is sculpted as a separate piece and then glued into the incomplete head it covers.
If nothing else, this set is strong when it comes to color contrast. Widow's suit was a dark grey with black accents, with the only
spots of "color" being teal shoulderpads that are nearly the same shade as the suit, and a dark golden Widow hourglass belt buckle. And then, next to that in the tray, you've got Red Guardian, with all those bright white straps, silver buckles and stars, and two shades of red for the body of the suit: a nice brick red for the cloth sections, and darker red for the armor parts. His big bushy beard is darker on the sides than down the center, and they've even painted the stubble area on his scalp.
At last, it's sunk in that MCU Red Guardian doesn't use a shield,
so this toy doesn't include one (though that hexagonal lump between his shoulderblades definitely looks like somewhere a shield could attach if he had one). He does get a pair of large pistols that store on the back of his belt, and a pair of hands to hold them. His other hands are a fist and an open hand, for brawling times.
With Boring Black Widow and Superfluous Red Guardian, I had almost zero interest in this set. I saw it the same time I got Sentry (with his USAgent pack-in), and have seen it multiple times since, but I kept purposely passing on it. The Walmart that had the collector display put it in the clearance aisle, and I've been checking regularly to see if it was finally low enough to be worth buying - all I wanted was for it to go below $30, but Walmart jumped all the way from $34 to $20. Dang, guys! Great deal for me. Especially since Red Guardian turned out to be so much better than expected.
-- 06/29/26
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