*Some Alexei-related spoilers.*
While Yelena is clearly a new figure in the MCU, it’s unclear whether Alexei or Melina will be appearing again. And I don’t normally make a habit out of doing write-ups for characters who seem one-and-done (not including Wenwu, for whom I’ll make all manner of exceptions,) but I’ve got another week before the inevitable Moon Knight posts begin and I do enjoy Alexei a lot, so I wanted to talk about him.
In his heyday, Alexei was Red Guardian, the Soviet Union’s answer to Captain America, but while Steve got frozen in the ice and reappeared in the modern era still in his prime, Alexei had time to go to seed. We’re introduced to him in flashback, but when we first see him in the main setting of the story, he’s cooling his heels in a Russian prison, trying to impress his fellow inmates with almost-assuredly embellished stories of the glory days.
And that’s the Alexei we get to know in the movie. He’s very self-centered; his celebrity is important to him, and he’s constantly on the lookout for validation of his prowess. When Natasha and Yelena bust him out of prison and semi-reluctantly enlist him in their mission to take down the Red Room, he squeezes into his old Red Guardian suit even though he’s far past the days of it fitting him, and he’s arrogant enough to think it still looks good on him. He’s more than a bit of a lunk, with the women in his makeshift family spending a good chunk of time rolling their eyes at him.
As such, he’s a comedic character on the whole. There are some lazy fat jokes (the MCU, a.k.a. the land of abs for days, isn’t huge on body positivity,) some jokes that play on him being obtuse, and some jokes that take full advantage of his overly high opinion of himself. It’s not the most well-drawn characterization out there, but in David Harbour’s hands, Alexei stays entertaining throughout the film.
If that was all he was, Alexei might wear thin by the end of the movie, but fortunately, we do glimpse some deeper layers for him. First there’s the contrast between his enthusiastic “getting the band back together” attitude to reuniting with Natasha and Yelena. For him, it’s a chance to prove he’s still got it, while for them, it’s a deeply personal mission to dismantle the organization responsible for their trauma and exploitation as children. He and Yelena butt heads over his obvious annoyance in looking back on the years that they were together in a cover-story family. When Yelena blows up at Alexei over him making yet another joke of what were, for her, the formative years of her life, he seeks her out to make it up to her, singing “American Pie,” her favorite song back when he was a sleeper agent acting as her father. And regardless of his comic-relief status, he’s still there infiltrating and attacking the Red Room with the rest of them.
The biggest reason I’m going the Character Highlight route with Alexei, rather than Favorite Characters, is because there’s a definite disconnect between the Alexei we see in the opening flashback and the Alexei we know in the rest of the film. True, more than 20 years pass in the interim, but the Alexei at the start of the movie is a sharp Russian agent, commanding and decisive, ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice. The guy who next pops up in a Russian jail is more arrogant, dim-witted, and tone deaf than the guy we first met, and there’s no real attempt to explain the disconnect between the two.
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