VERDICT: Entertaining Marvel team-up tale proves you can make a banquet out of odds and ends that were stuck in the back of the fridge.
If The Avengers was precisely the movie 2012 America needed, as the nation reveled in Obama-era exuberance while still reeling from 9/11, then Thunderbolts* fits the bill for 2025, presenting a world where everything kinda sucks, and powerful people seem intent on crafting your demise. It’s the solidarity response to the studio’s very own recent history of reactionary narratives, one proposing that if we all have each other’s backs, we might get through it, unbowed if not unbroken.
That Thunderbolts* (and yes, the movie explains that asterisk) emerges as one of the MCU’s most successful team-up movies is its victory, considering that the team in question is made up of a collection of sidekicks, oddballs, and losers, mostly culled from lesser-known Marvel movies and even TV shows.
But under the sure hand of formerly-indie director Jake Schreier (Robot & Frank, the underrated Paper Towns), these heroes learn to get over their mutual suspicions and whip themselves into something resembling a cohesive unit.
The collective suspicion stems from the fact that, when they meet, they’re all trying to kill each other. Yelena (Florence Pugh), sister of the late Black Widow and similarly assassin-trained, has been running shady errands for CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and now that Valentina is facing impeachment over her dodgy corporate past, she sends Yelena to a secret facility in Colorado to dispatch the ephemeral Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), last seen in Ant-Man and the Wasp.
But Ghost has been sent there to kill Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), from Black Widow, and Taskmaster has been sent there to eliminate John Walker (Wyatt Russell), the disgraced U.S. Agent (from the Captain America and the Winter Soldier series), who has been sent there to murder Yelena.
Once they realize they’re all being played by Valentina, these misfit mercenaries must put aside their differences and fight off the CIA chief’s efforts to eliminate the loose ends of her past. That past also includes the dazed and confused Bob (Lewis Pullman), who mysteriously shows up in the middle of the Colorado battle, and Sentry, a lab-enhanced superhuman that Valentina has crafted to fill the void left behind by the Avengers, and — bonus — to do Valentina’s bidding.
It matters not to her that Sentry happens to be an emotionally troubled young man whose deep well of depression becomes his true superpower, one that threatens to engulf Manhattan and perhaps the world in its inky void. (Another reason why Thunderbolts* feels tailor-made for the 2025 zeitgeist.)
Throw in the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), aka Bucky aka Congressman Barnes, as well as Yelena’s itching-for-action dad, the former Soviet super-soldier Red Guardian (David Harbour), and you’ve got a collection of MCU also-rans who, miraculously, are ready for their close-up.
The screenplay by Eric Pearson (Black Widow) and Joanna Calo (Bojack Horseman) contrasts the begrudging team-building of our heroes with the loneliness and despair of their foe, but Thunderbolts* explores these ideas with a relatively light touch, never straying too far from the MCU formula of zippy banter occasionally interrupted by gargantuan action set-pieces.
Those set pieces hit effectively, whether it’s a car chase involving armored Jeeps and a late-model limousine or Sentry’s eerie rampage through New York City, turning any bystanders into smudgy shadows on the pavement. Editors Angela M. Catanzaro and Harry Yoon, as well as scorers Son Lux, don’t rewrite the rules of superhero movies as much as they follow them effectively but unobtrusively.
Also following the MCU rules are the casting directors, who give us another wildly overqualified ensemble that knows how to hit their emotional marks while clad in body armor. Pugh’s Yelena conveys a world-weariness but also a framework of sensitivity that allows her to reach out to the despairing Sentry and to rebuild her relationship with her estranged father.
Louis-Dreyfus gets to expand her Veep skill-set into grander villainy, and Harbour’s Red Guardian continues to be one of the franchise’s most broadly memorable comedic creations. (Here’s hoping we get to see more of the talented Geraldine Viswanathan and Wendell Pierce — as, respectively, Valentina’s harried assistant and a combative congressman — in future chapters.)
In true Marvel fashion, Thunderbolts* ends by setting up at least one or two upcoming movies. (Yes, you have to stay through the bitter end if that matters to you.) But for 2025, when nothing seems stable or reliable — particularly in the film industry — even that bit of franchise-seeding comes off as hopeful. If the MCU can imagine a better tomorrow, maybe its audience can, too.
