Jonah Naplan   May 4, 2025

Marvel has been in desperate need of a revival. Films like “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” “The Marvels,” and the recent “Captain America: Brave New World” have plummeted the once-beloved studio down to a record low, both critically and financially. Their newest movie “Thunderbolts*” offers something of a healing elixir by returning back to what made us love these big, ensemble-driven movies like “The Avengers” and “Guardians of the Galaxy” in the first place by assembling another ragtag group of weirdos who are forced to work together despite their differences. It does not, to be sure, completely repair everything broken with the multi-billion-dollar franchise in a post-Covid world, but director Jake Schreier has taken a step in the right direction.

A major weakness right off the bat: You might need to do some homework to keep up with “Thunderbolts*.” Almost all of the characters are from some previously-existing property, and might feel underwritten here because they were developed elsewhere. Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Alexei, aka the Red Guardian, aka Yelena’s dad (David Harbour), and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) were all in the solo “Black Widow” movie, U.S. Agent John Walker (Wyatt Russell) was introduced in the Disney+ series “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” Ava Starr, aka Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), was in “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) has appeared in numerous Marvel projects since 2011.

You can still enjoy “Thunderbolts*” well enough if you aren’t familiar with all these backstories, but they may be of help in understanding every single line of dialogue uttered by these characters, who first meet in a top-secret vault in the middle of nowhere. They all individually work for the evil Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and realize they’ve been sent on a suicide mission once they get trapped in the facility together and it starts to blow. In this early sequence, Schreier and writers Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo begin to develop the camaraderie between these anti-heroes, as each of their roles in the team is clearly defined. 

Walker is confident and cocky, trying to be the leader; as the new Captain America, he’s overly entitled and very smug. Yelena is headstrong but flawed, a voice of reason deeply haunted by her traumatic past; therefore, she’s the most empathetic team member. Alexei is largely the comic relief, but he does get a sincere emotional moment with his daughter in the last thirty minutes that reminds us why, yes, Harbour can be an effective dramatic actor. Ghost is largely an afterthought in this movie, as is Bucky, who we’ve seen so much of by this point that we already know what to think of him. All of the characters’ roles are partially shaped by the sudden arrival of “ordinary” guy Bob (Lewis Pullman), who the group meets at the vault and isn’t sure what to do with at first. Soon enough, though, he proves to be an invaluable asset to the team when it’s revealed that he’s actually the only surviving test subject of an experimental medical trial known as Project Sentry (comic book fans and plot theorists should already know how this is going to turn out).

The action in “Thunderbolts*” is largely competent, even if the visual compositions are poor. That beginning sequence itself is one of the strongest in the movie, a four-way fight between characters who have each been assigned one of the others to terminate. Another is the moment when Bucky enters the picture, riding in on his motorcycle and taking down a queue of armored trucks pursuing the heroes. The last setpiece, which sees the “Thunderbolts,” as they eventually name themselves, facing off against the big bad, is effective emotionally as well as physically; we believe in the weight of every single punch. And yet, all of these sequences are nearly undermined by a dark or otherwise drained color palette that casts a cloudy pall over all the action. Do you recall wondering why Damien Chazelle’s “Whiplash” looked so yellow? You’ll have similar questions as to why “Thunderbolts*” appears so gray. The movie’s climax on the streets of New York City is striking because it looks rainy without the rain.

Cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo is to be commended, though, for the way he frames these characters, either as a group or, more strikingly, by themselves. “Thunderbolts*” is a movie about loneliness, about reckoning with isolation when it feels like you’ve got no one. Most of the characters get a haunting moment in the film to directly confront their past trauma or personal turmoil, and these sequences are powerful in defining who these people are without the supersuit. The last fifteen minutes are a marvel of surrealist proportions and hold more metaphors than this studio has created in all of its post-Covid projects put together. It’s cool to see a franchise that built itself around massive action setpieces attempt something deeply personal and human, an empathy trick I’d argue they’ve had little success with since the first “Black Panther.”

Above all, though, “Thunderbolts*” is Yelena’s movie and she rocks. Further solidifying herself as one of the strongest and most consistent actresses working today, Pugh does impeccable work here. Not for nothing does Schreier show us more of her past than anybody’s else’s; he wants us to like and connect with her on a level beyond just the explosive spectacle. Like Robert Downey Jr. in the original “Iron Man,” she’s charming as much as she is relatable, even if her troubled, violent past is really anything but. Pullman is also wonderful; his subtle evolution from the modest everyman who was never supposed to be in this scenario into an entity much darker is profound. We can see his internal turmoil physically manifest itself as demons of the past and figures of insecurity and unfulfillment. There’s a little bit of Bob in all of us. Sometimes we know him. Sometimes we are him. Seeing these sorts of difficult emotions depicted on-screen is uplifting, especially in a $280 million wide-release superhero movie with broad appeal.

There’s so much good in “Thunderbolts*” that I think it will grossly outweigh the bad. Watching it reminded me of the power of an ensemble and how comic book movies used to work so well because they used a team of misfits as the grounded baseline for an otherwise fantastical story. Between all the action sequences, you’ll surely find somebody to connect with here, even if, at a surface-level, their character seems out of reach. After all, superheroes are humans, too.

Now playing in theaters.