Directed by Jake Schreier | Written by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo | 126 min | ▲▲▲
I’ve very much joined the chorus of critical voices disappointed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since its first major arc wrapped up with Avengers: Endgame. There have been interesting failures, fun romps, and intriguing new characters, but little sense of a broadening and deepening of the mythology. Instead, too many messes and misfires, with only one effort in the past five years that really brought the emotional wallop of the best of the franchise.
In view of all that, I can understand why we’re getting a lot of enthusiasm with this new Marvel effort, officially kicking off the summer 2025 blockbuster season. Thunderbolts* is actually about something, and you can watch how it squirms to forefront its themes ahead of the MCU formula of gravity-defying and jokey super heroics. It’s not stellar, but it manages to be a lot better than, say, the last MCU movie we sat through.
As usual, the casting is superb. This movie forefronts one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, Florence Pugh. She was introduced in Black Widow, as Yelena, the younger sister of the late, much-missed Natasha Romanoff, and she carries this thing effortlessly.
She’s a melancholy assassin working for a recent MCU antagonist, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, played with a lot of enthusiasm by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Val is also the head of the CIA while trying to hide her controlling interest in an evil corporate entity sponsoring a superhero-creation project, The Sentry. As she’s about to be impeached on Capitol Hill she’s doing her best to destroy all connection to her dirty dealings — that includes trapping and killing all the agents who’ve done work for her: Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), John Walker aka alternative Captain America (Wyatt Russell), and Yelena, as well as an dude named Bob (Lewis Pullman, who weirdly also played a guy named Bob in Top Gun: Maverick). Bob doesn’t know why he’s there, but he’s gonna end up being important later.
The first act is largely concerned with these erstwhile villains and misfits trying to kill each other, and then trying not to die in Val’s secret mountain lair — which might be fun but they keep pausing so Yelena and Bob can talk about their feelings of ennui. I’m all for character-building conversations, but the script isn’t sharp enough to make this feel natural. The forward momentum of the whole movie grinds to a halt too often in the first 45 minutes as it establishes stakes and why we should care about these folks.
Fortunately, David Harbour as Alexei, the Red Guardian, and Yelena’s father, shows up in a limo and that helps matters — he’s the movie’s most reliable laugh generator. Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), the only Avengers veteran in the picture, also helps bring this new group together, though Marvel deciding a former brain-controlled killer should become a politician makes no sense at all for his character.
As the movie sets up its finale, we do start to care for these people. Well, not all of them, and not equally, but certainly Yelena and Alexei, who have a good moment together on the street outside Grand Central Station — right where the Avengers fought aliens to a standstill back in 2012. It’s worth mentioning the talented Geraldine Viswanathan is terrific as Val’s assistant, Mel. Hopefully she gets more of a chance to shine in future movies.
Mostly though, this is Pugh’s movie, and as Yelena she (and to some degree, Bob) helps us think about how having a genuine purpose, one that helps other people, can make you feel better about yourself. It’s also about how depression and mental illness is a void that can be beaten with the help of other people. It’s a pretty simple message conveyed clumsily between a bunch of pretty rote action set pieces, the likes of which we’ve seen too often before. Marvel needs to regularly not only refresh its character beats it needs to provide new ways of wowing us in the action scenes.
Still, the good parts of Thunderbolts* provide a reason to feel optimistic about where the MCU could be headed.
