Joe and Anthony Russo made the biggest movie ever. Yes, you can use domestic vs. worldwide, raw dollars vs. inflation, and rereleases vs. single shots to quibble a bit, but the fact is, Avengers: Endgame hit the rarified heights usually reserved for Star Wars and/or Avatar movies. For fans of satisfying blockbuster entertainment, this should produce a bounty of rewards, for while George Lucas didn’t direct a single movie between the beginning of the first Star Wars trilogy and his prequels, and hasn’t directed anything in the 20 years since Revenge of the Sith (not to mention selling off Lucasfilm in 2012), and Cameron topped the 12-year wait between Titanic and Avatar with a 13-year wait for a sequel to the latter, Joe and Anthony Russo make movies pretty regularly. Since the triumph of Endgame six years ago, they’ve made three, which actually puts them on a faster pace than the notably prolific likes of Steven Spielberg.
If you can’t immediately recall when or if you saw the Russos’ follow-up to Endgame, though, that could be because they followed up one of the biggest movie-theater events of all time with three different streaming movies. Cherry, for Apple TV+, came out in 2021, followed quickly by The Gray Man for Netflix in 2022. Their latest, The Electric State, is another Netflix production.
Technically, it is possible to have seen these Russo Brothers movies in theaters. I know because I paid to see both The Gray Man and The Electric State, the former because it was still early in the days of reopened movie theaters and I was desperate to get out of the house and the latter out of sheer stubbornness and also the conviction that I might fall asleep if I watched it on my couch. So I feel uniquely qualified to comment on the Russo Brothers’ post-superhero career, which is about to come to an end as Marvel seems to have begged them back for another Avengers two-parter. It can perhaps best be summed up as: What on earth?
Granted, I’ve preferred the two Avengers movies by Joss Whedon to the two by Joe and Anthony Russo. But the Russos also made a superhero classic with Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Endgame does an admirable job of bringing the overblown series back down to the core six who came together in the first Avengers movie. Some may have marveled at the grayish-murk spectacle of fan service, but that movie really makes its bones in its first hour, allowing the audience to actually spend some time with some of these characters again in the aftermath of a major defeat, calling back to their early success directing the eclectic ensembles of Arrested Development and Community. Their post-Avengers movies have included Marvel alumni Chris Evans, Chris Pratt, Anthony Mackie, and Tom Holland. Are they particularly adept at providing actors with a friendly, welcoming environment?
As Jason Bateman might quip: They’d have to be. The actual performances in these movies are often appallingly bad. Chris Evans goes into arch-mugging overtime reveling in his villainous Gray Man role. Tom Holland looks in over his head during the frenetic traumas of Cherry. Chris Pratt caps off a decade of coasting by somehow coasting even more in The Electric State.
Surely, though, a pair of directing brothers who have been in the business for more than two decades have something to say when given blank checks and canvases? Winter Soldier wasn’t exactly plumbing the depths of the human soul, but it was a rock-solid superhero adventure gesturing at some real-world themes. Cherry is the movie where the Russos seem most eager to prove themselves, but it’s all recycled grit, a story of PTSD, drugs, and crime that mostly seems to have inspired the filmmakers to think: Whoa, shit’s hardcore. Their next movie, The Gray Man, looked like it might be the kind of nastier, less fantastical action spectacular that doesn’t necessarily fit with Marvel. It is, sort of, but it’s shot through a weird haze, and while some of the hits punch through, it’s aggressively empty-headed, generically plotted, and forgettable. It may be their best post-Endgame movie.
It sure isn’t The Electric State, based on a graphic novel set in an alternate-history 1990s, following a massive robot-rights uprising and subsequent war with the humans. Millie Bobby Brown, yet another famous face done no favors by the Russos’ underdirecting, plays a rebellious teenager who realizes the consciousness of her presumed-dead brother may be alive in an escaped robot. They then connect with an ex-soldier (Pratt) to, well, kind of wander around a designated robo-wasteland and meet a bunch of well-rendered but cutesy robot characters and eventually take on an evil corporation that took advantage of the human-robot conflict.
It’s bad form to hold a movie’s budget against it, but it’s hard to watch The Electric State without the mind wandering to an investigation of where the hell the movie’s supposed $300 million went, even allowing for the higher upfront fees usually offered by streaming services. A decent chunk of the movie is set inside an abandoned mall. The bad guy’s lair is a nondescript room. The visual effects look good, and there’s one sort of impressive slapsticky robot-versus-drone battle sequence. It’s shot with the same overcast, low-contrast drabness as the rest of the movie, as if the Russos are so determined to justify the muted palette of their Avengers movies that they’ve retroactively decided making audiences squint to see action is their style. The whole thing has Amblin-classic calculation. It plays like an idiot’s misunderstanding of Steven Spielberg was somehow brought to life and made to remake A.I. and Ready Player One, “fixing” them with an algorithm.
Is this the worst three-movie run of any filmmaker who’s made a billion-dollar global grosser? F. Gary Gray is working on it, following his Fate of the Furious with Men in Black International and Lift. Michael Bay has any given three Transformers movies in his corner. But for now, the Russos might have the title. Some of it is likely the craven opportunism that’s led them to praise streaming and A.I. (the tech, not the Spielberg classic) as the future of entertainment, cynically helping to wean audiences off of the big screen after gathering so many of them in a famously beloved collective experience. It’s almost like they’re trying to clear the room and lock the door behind them.
But their question-box success (the streamers must be happy with these movies on some level) also points to the way that mega-smash success can now be essentially farmed out. Another one of the biggest movies of recent years created a similar situation for its director: J.J. Abrams made The Force Awakens, still a fixture on the biggest-ever-movies list. As a follow-up, he… dithered a bit, then wound up abruptly picking back up the trilogy-closer The Rise of Skywalker, which he promptly biffed. Five years later, he still hasn’t delivered a follow-up. The director he replaced on Skywalker? Colin Trevorrow, who in between Jurassic World mega-grossers made the appalling The Book of Henry. There’s a whole group of directors raised on Spielberg, Lucas, and Cameron without much sense of how to communicate more than love for those movies. Some of these filmmakers seem aptly paralyzed when they’ve run short on franchises to revitalize; the Russos, meanwhile, are championing “original” cinema in a way that looks suspiciously like putting it sleep. The Electric State tries to preach the value of human connection, but in the context of 2025, it’s more like a plea for capitulation: Can’t we all work together on this crap?
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
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