Thunderbolts (2025)

Score: 3.5 / 5

The MCU seems to be really struggling to continue moving forward, yet this year's Thunderbolts offers some promising signs about the franchise's direction. I won't recount the plot here because a) you've probably already seen it if you're interested, and b) as with most superhero films, the plot doesn't really matter. What does matter here is visual design, thematic conceit, manageable stakes, and a curiously weak introduction that almost fails before, impossibly, climbing up to a climax and denouement that feel significant and -- most importantly -- earned.

Taking as its cue a certain dim and bleak visual dynamic riddling recent MCU films, the film starts almost drained of warmth in its color palette. We are reunited with Yelena (Florence Pugh), emotionally numbed while grieving her sister (back in Endgame, if you can believe the timeline has gotten so wildly widespread yet gone almost nowhere linerar-ly since 2019) and contemplating suicide in a somewhat family-friendly way. Working as a sort of black-ops private agent for CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), Yelena is sent on a couple clean-up missions for her boss, who is under Congressional investigation, only to discover that she herself may be on the slate for deletion. Yelena teams up with others in similar shoes, and their secret collective is formed as a rogue faction of third-rate outcasts masquerading as antiheroes.

The union of Yelena with US Agent (John Walker, played by Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) is well-written and shot here, fighting each other as they slowly realize that they are all pawns in Valentina's game. They are disposable in their world and in ours, as the sad, hard truth is that if you haven't been keeping up with the MCU series streaming exclusively on Disney+, you simply won't know or care about these characters. Heck, I've been keeping up, and I still need to scour the internet to remember who has done what and showed up where in alliance with whomever in what series titles. It's a nightmare. Thankfully, you don't necessarily need to know much about these characters beyond what Thunderbolts provides about them.

This allows the actors a lot of room to play and express themselves as discontented and dispassionate soldiers. Remember how the first Avengers were light-hearted white men slapping each other on the back while joking about cussing? This is a far cry from that, with each character dealing with crushing disappointment, shame, guilt, and self-doubt and allowing it to lash out at each other with snide, sneering humor and the uniquely aggravated impatience of boredom. They are, quite literally, heroes stuck in the shadow of their more famous counterparts, yet those counterparts have all but abandoned a world in need. Pugh is clearly the protagonist of the film despite its ensemble cast; she perhaps most clearly is struggling with the crushing void (read: depression) and goes through the best arc of the film, literally sacrificing herself while acting on full throttle. David Harbour's Red Guardian and Sebastian Stan's Winter Soldier join the team as well, rounding out the angsty mercs with macho gusto. 

The motif of shadows becomes literalized not just in the shadowy nature of Valentina's black ops mercenaries, as they start the film being, but also in its secondary antagonist, Bob. Lewis Pullman's awkward, anxious little man who had been subjected to human experimentation in Valentina's secret trials to create superhumans known as Sentries. He unexpectedly survived and was cared for by Yelena before being recaptured and brainwashed by Valentina, who effectively convinces him he's a god. Trying to kill him fails, and Bob becomes the Void, his destructive shadow-self who begins trapping all of New York City and its citizens in darkness and nightmarish dreams of their personal traumatic memories. This motif is showcased throughout the film, in pointed dialogue about depression, trauma, guilt, shame, and suicide, and in visual elements, including color desaturation, the opening Marvel logo, and the pretty cool special effects of the Void and his assault on civilians. Cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo (You're Next, A Ghost Story, The Green Knight) really nails it here.

As with any superhero flick, there are unnecessary action flourishes and sequences that don't do much other than keep us locked into familiar narrative beats. Schreier doesn't always seem to know what to do with action scenes, so the fighting is often unclear and muddled, perhaps intentionally (as these are not the best or most polished Avengers ever) but also formally through editing cuts that don't always follow or flow. Thankfully, the action isn't really the focus of this film, so these issues are minimal. Thankfully, too, Schreier knows that the success of this film is in its characters and their emotional appeal, so he focuses mostly on Pugh, who plies her typically A-lister craft on a character that desperately needs to have real life breathed into her. She does with aplomb, making Yelena one of the most interesting, consequential, and worthwhile characters in the entire franchise.

As the end of MCU's Phase Five, Thunderbolts may not be the Avengers movie anybody wanted or asked for, but it might be what we need at this point. Instead of a climax relentlessly shoving debris-clouded CGI at us as entire planets collapse and aliens descend on war-torn cityscapes, this one features mostly plays of light and shadow, interspersed with equally visually dynamic dream sequences. With these smaller stakes -- visually, if not necessarily thematically -- we can connect better with the unique aspects of these characters and how they might change the general sensation of superhero movies in this series moving forward into Phase Six. One can only hope, anyway.