The trouble with trying to make Thunderbolts*—yes, the asterisk is part of the title—at this moment in time is that we have already had multiple incarnations of the Suicide Squad. This problem is on full display in the first teaser for the film, which is three minutes of wacky bad-guy team-up action set to a chopped-up version of a well-known song. (It also doesn’t help that the song is The Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” which, cinematically speaking, is indelibly tied to the end of Fight Club and has been for 25 years.)
Here are some bad guys! Here is a voiceover about the nature of bad guys! Here is a weird trap for the bad guys, plus some guy named Bob (Lewis Pullman), who is very clearly not just a guy named Bob. Here is David Harbour doing that cartoony accent for way too much of the trailer!
But here, also, is Florence Pugh doing that incredible deadpan. Perhaps I am simply a sucker for this, but her Yelena has a weird, down-to-earth (in a murdery way) charm that I could watch for hours (and probably will, though this movie’s runtime hasn’t been announced). The most memorable thing in Hawkeye was not action or plot; it was Yelena and her mac and cheese, terrifying and intriguing Kate Bishop at once.
And now she also gets to pal around with Hannah John-Kamen, returning as Ant-Man and the Wasp‘s terribly underused Ghost. (John-Kamen in an action role is just straight-up catnip for us Killjoys fans). Olga Kurylenko is back as Taskmaster, Wyatt Russell as the deeply annoying John Walker, Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, and of course Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) shows up to cause havoc and clean his arm in the dishwasher.
Thunderbolts* is directed by Jake Schreier, whose previous films Robot & Frank and Paper Towns make him seem like something of an odd choice. IMDb lists three writers—Joanna Calo (The Bear), Lee Sung Jin (Beef), and Eric Pearson (Black Widow)—with a “created by” nod to Kurt Busiek. It’s in theaters May 2, 2025.
