Director - Jake Schreier
Cast - Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, Olga Kurylenko, Lewis Pullman, Geraldine Viswanathan, Chris Bauer, Wendell Pierce, David Harbour, Hannah John Kamen, Julia Louis Dreyfus.
Run Time – 126 Minutes
Somewhere between the 38th post-credit tease and Marvel’s seventh spinoff about someone’s magical uncle, we lost the plot — not just narratively, but cosmically. Thunderbolts is the movie that finally stares that yawning void in the face and mutters, “Yeah, well… let’s make a team out of it.”
Directed by Jake Schreier (of Robot & Frank, the only movie about a heist robot with feelings you’ll ever need), Thunderbolts isn’t trying to save the Marvel Cinematic Universe so much as acknowledge that it needs saving. It’s a film about backup players, filler episodes, and budget-conscious espionage, delivered with a sly wink and the vague, lingering scent of reshoots.
The cast? A group of Marvel’s least-likely-to-be-action-figures: Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), Red Guardian (David Harbour), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), and an especially confused Lewis Pullman as Bob Reynolds, who may or may not be a godlike entity known as “the Void.” Imagine The Breakfast Club with PTSD and tactical gear, and you’re halfway there.
At first, the tone feels like classic Marvel: quippy, chaotic, self-aware to the point of exhaustion. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, returning as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, seems to know she’s in a glorified group therapy session disguised as a $200 million action comedy and plays it accordingly — as if Veep’s Selina Meyer got bored and wandered onto the Helicarrier.
But the further you go, the more Thunderbolts becomes something else — not a comeback for the MCU, but a slow, weird unpacking of its burnout. It’s a movie about superheroes who don’t feel like heroes, who don’t want to team up, and who are vaguely aware that their own relevance is rapidly diminishing. It’s Marvel’s midlife crisis, with Florence Pugh holding the steering wheel and David Harbour mumbling something Soviet and sad in the passenger seat.
Plot-wise, the movie is held together by string and sheer commitment to the bit. There’s a covert mission, double-crosses, mental trauma, a mysterious shadow entity that eats light (and may eat the franchise if things don’t pick up), and one too many meta-jokes about branding. The best part? The asterisk in the title. No, seriously. It’s a joke, a spoiler, and a shrug all rolled into one — a symbol of Marvel’s current identity crisis.
The film’s final third, where the so-called “Void” finally shows up, shifts gears from jokey chaos to unsettling intensity. Here, Schreier taps into something unexpected: emotional horror. It’s like someone snuck in a low-budget existential sci-fi flick in the middle of your superhero team-up. It mostly works. It might even be brave. Or it might just be weird in a way Marvel rarely allows itself to be anymore.
Pugh holds it together, somehow. Her Yelena remains one of the MCU’s most human-scale characters — funny, flawed, and emotionally raw in a franchise more comfortable with tech suits and multiverse shenanigans than actual human feelings. Her chemistry with the rest of the team feels messy and lived-in, the kind of anti-dysfunction that Guardians of the Galaxy once made lovable. There’s camaraderie here, but it’s crusted over with resentment and regret — like coworkers who’ve trauma-bonded over a shared inbox.
There’s also an unusual amount of therapy-speak. People talk about healing, triggers, validation. One character describes his powers as “a curse shaped like potential,” which might be the most honest metaphor for post-Endgame Marvel yet.
Final Verdict: Thunderbolts isn’t the MCU’s salvation. But it is the most honest thing Marvel’s made in years — a misfit movie about misfit characters who no longer believe in the system that created them. It’s uneven, overloaded, and weirdly personal. And that asterisk? That’s not a joke. That’s the point.