<em>Thunderbolts*</em>: Marvel&#8217;s (Mostly) Back, Baby!

I never thought I’d have to open a review of a Marvel movie with a content warning, but these are special times, so here goes: Content warning for suicidal ideation, frank discussions of mental health issues, child abuse, and drug addiction.

Having gotten that out of the way: You know how sometimes you see a movie that reminds you what movies can do? For me, this year, that’s Sinners. Companion, The Presence, Black Bag, The Monkey—all were good, solid films. A few were better than just “good”—but Sinners was on another level. (It’ll be back in IMAX in mid-May, see it if you can get a ticket.)

Thunderbolts* reminded me what MARVEL can do.  

The last film of the MCU’s Phase Five was directed by Jake Schreier (Paper Towns, Robot & Frank), from a script by Eric Pearson (Thor: Ragnarok) and Joanna Calo (BoJack Horseman, The Bear). As the A24 parody trailer pointed out, the cinematography was done by Andrew Droz Palermo, who worked on The Green Knight and A Ghost Story; the editors were Angela Catanzaro (Prey) and Harry Yoon (Minari, Euphoria); and the soundtrack was done by Son Lux (Everything Everywhere All At Once)—and I’m pleased to report that all of that shows.

Characters we’ve built relationships with were deepened and made more complex. The performances are all excellent, with a special shout to Florence Pugh for bringing FEELINGS, and David Harbour for being a complicated Commie dad who’s more than just a punchline. The villain is a little complicated, but is still more hiss-worthy than tragic; Lewis Pullman introduces us to an extremely complex character and keeps adding nuance in every scene. The film deals honestly with the studio’s legacy and potential future. Thunderbolts* gives us real action scenes performed by real people rather than a CGI clusterfuck. It give us a real ending that has actual emotional weight and consequences. It gives us a fun mid-credits scene, and an after-credits scene that sets up the next thing without undercutting everything that comes before. It’s actually funny, not just “constant Whedon snark” funny, but it balances the humor with a surprisingly dark second half. (There are also references to both Under the Skin and Oppenheimer, but in a good way, not a distracting way.) Also, the asterisk does actually mean something!

I don’t want to spoil anything—because yes, for the first time since 2023, I’m recommending you see a Marvel movie in the theater—so I’ll give you a very slight rundown that’s heavier on theme than plot.

Yelena Bulova’s depressed. In the opening scenes, we see her going through the motions at work, like most of us have done at one time or another, but since her work is International Spy/Assassin/Terrifying Person, this is kind of funny. She feels more and more like her life doesn’t have any meaning. She gets so desperate she even tries to talk to her dad, Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour), who spends his nights watching videos of his glory days as Red Guardian while he lives in a run-down house and tries to get his limo service off the ground. He’s not really a font of advice. She finally tells Valentina Allegra De Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, perfect as always) that she wants to be more forward facing (like Natasha, though she won’t say that out loud) and Valentina agrees, after she finishes one last job.

We all know how One Last Jobs turn out.

She ends up having to work with a few other mercenaries Valentina has used and thrown out over the years, including Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), John Walker/U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell ), Antonia Dreykov/Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), and, weirdly, an amnesiac named Bob (Lewis Pullman) who seems to simply appear in the facility they’re all trapped in, but who turns out to have hidden depths. Eventually, Senator Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan at his deadpan best), who’s been working to get the nefarious Valentina impeached, becomes the last member of their scrappy crew.

The interesting thing about the plot, and about the action, is that it all feels real. On a concrete level, the characters’ fighting styles all tell you something about them. When they fight against each other, or together, they’re communicating with each other. These are real, mostly non-superpowered people who have weight. When they punch each other, it looks like it hurts. When someone throws one of them across a room, you feel the shock of their body hitting the wall or the floor. We always know where everyone is in relation to everyone else, both physically and emotionally.

Spoilers for Black Widow, but I already pretty much hated Black Widow by the end, between the flimsiness of the action, the terrible blocking in the action sequences, and how the utterly non-superpowered Natasha gets punched in the face repeatedly and barely even gets a nosebleed. But then the post-credits scene made me want to throw a shoe through my television, which I cannot afford to replace. Why give us an actually emotionally resonant scene at Natasha’s grave only to ruin it? Why show us Yelena in all of her pain, only to have Valentina show up with a new gig, in a scene that’s just there to set up a fucking TV show???

About ten minutes into Thunderbolts* I began to suspect that they weren’t going to do that this time. I began to let myself engage with the film. And it worked! They didn’t do the thing! There wasn’t a single “Well, that happened” in the whole film! The writers and director allowed us to care about the characters, and the plot, without winking at us every five seconds to take us out of the moment! I didn’t feel like I was being sold a product!

(Well, OK, maybe Wheaties.)

Even more interesting than is that Thunderbolts* has tangible, real-world stakes. It takes a concept that could have been too abstract and brings it down to earth. Real, heartbreaking things happen in this movie. It’s a self-contained story with a real resolution, not just a punt to the next one, and watching it on that level is rewarding. This is, at its heart, an action movie about depression. (It turns out that A24 parody trailer wasn’t totally off the mark.) It goes to some dark places, but it does it in interesting ways that don’t trivialize the characters’ struggles. Much like in James Gunn’s take on The Suicide Squad, these are all characters who have done terrible things, or had terrible things done to them, and who have thought more than once that the world would be better off without them. (One character repeatedly says “I just make everything worse,” and for a while, the film does nothing but corroborate that.) But unlike The Suicide Squad taking that idea and creating a dark, violent joke (which, to be fair, I enjoyed immensely), Thunderbolts* wrestles with that idea with brutal honesty. What would it look like if a person struggling with deep depression and meth addiction suddenly got superpowers? What would it feel like if a person who had been tortured into becoming a living weapon was finally free to do whatever she wanted?

At the same time, the movie is telling a meta story about the MCU itself, and it also mostly sticks that (superhero) landing. Yes, after years of depending on the Avengers, the world has to wake up to the fact that their era is over. (And so does Marvel Studios.) Yes, after years of murdering for money, Yelena and her fellow mercenaries have to deal with the weight of everything they’ve done. Yes, after years of depression and drug addiction, you have to face yourself, and not just try to “fix” yourself with an experimental medical procedure. The experimental medical procedure path worked one time, for Steve Rogers. All the other attempts have been extremely complicated.

But in Thunderbolts*, the whole point is that all of those things can be dealt with. You’re still a person. You have value. And it’s worth it to fight back from the low points of depression or addiction or cycling through every terrible thing you’ve ever done to try to create a new life for yourself. It might not be the postcard perfect life of an Avenger, but it can still be a great story.

(I’m so, so hoping that Marvel watched its own movie here.)

Having said all of this, I want to make it clear that Thunderbolts* doesn’t reach the giddy heights of the first Avengers film, or Winter Soldier, or the first Guardians of the Galaxy. But it balances real fun and humor with real moments of darkness and pathos. As I’ve mentioned before on this site, I usually try to see movies in the theater rather than at industry screenings. I like to gauge the reactions of people who have paid to see the movie, and get a sense of the crowd’s response, because if I’m telling you it’s worth seeing, that’ll be part of your experience, too. I don’t want people to fork money over for a dud in these precarious times. So I’ll end with this: Halfway through the previews, we got a trailer for James Gunn’s upcoming Superman. And people applauded it. (I don’t think I’ve ever heard people applaud a preview?) People applauded when Thunderbolts* ended. And after the final post-credits scene, when the lights came back up, a man in the theater actually yelled “Marvel’s back, baby!” I don’t know if I agree with that gentleman, but I hope he’s right.