Director – Jake Schreier, Screenplay – Joanna Calo & Eric Pearson, Story – Eric Pearson, Producers – Kevin Feige, Photography – Andrew Droz Palermo, Music – Son Lux, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jake Morrison, Visual Effects/Animation – Base FX (Supervisors – Jia Guodong, Jared Sandrew & Sam Zhang), Digital Domain 3.0 (Supervisor – Nikos Kalaitzidis, Animation Supervisor – Keith W. Smith), Industrial Light & Magic (Supervisor – Chris Wiebe, Animation Supervisor – Lee McNair), Visual Effects – Crafty Apes (Supervisor – Christian Wood), Framestore (Supervisor – Mat Krentz), Mammal Studio (Supervisor – Gregory D. Liegey), Raynault VFX (Supervisor – Sylvain Theroux) & Rising Sun Pictures (Supervisor – Matt Greig), Special Effects Supervisor – Dan Sudick, Production Design – Grace Yun. Production Company – Marvel Studios.
Cast
Florence Pugh (Yelena Belova), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Valentina Allegra de Fontaine), Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes), Lewis Pullman (Robert Reynolds), David Harbour (Alexei Shostakov), Wyatt Russell (John Walker), Hannah John-Kamen (Ava Starr), Geraldine Viswanathan (Mel), Wendell Pierce (Congressman Gary), Olga Kurylenko (Antonia Dreykov), Chris Bauer (Holt)
Plot
Yelena Belova is employed by CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine to eliminate evidence that Valentina was engaged in an illicit program to create superheroes through her company the O.X.E. Group as Valentina faces impeachment before a congressional enquiry. Yelena is sent on a mission to prevent people breaking in to steal secrets at an O.X.E. facility in the desert only to find that she faces three other people – the former Captain America successor John Walker, Ava Starr aka Ghost, and the assassin Antonia Dreykov, along with the amnesiac, apparently harmless Bob. Realising that they have been sent to eliminate each other, the group instead unite forces to make an escape. As Valentina and a heavily armed detachment arrive, it is discovered that Bob has vast powers, before he is captured. Joined by Bucky Barnes and Alexei Shostakov, they tentatively form a team they call Thunderbolts after Yelena’s losing high school soccer team. As they go confront Valentina who occupies the former Avengers headquarters, she introduces Bob as a new superhero of unimaginable power she calls The Sentry. He is easily able to defeat all of them. Yelena walks away, saying they never were a team. However, Bob has grown out of control and his dark side now emerges and begins eliminating the population of New York City en masse.
Films adapted from Marvel Comics have had an extraordinary success since 2008 where Marvel Studios built out using some of the lesser-known superheroes to create an audience desire to see them teamed up together, what became known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe (or The MCU). This resulted in a massive popularity that came to completely obliterate everything else at the box-office as Marvel rolled out one production after another. These included Iron Man (2008), Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), Thor (2011), Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Ant-Man (2015), Doctor Strange (2016), Black Panther (2018), Captain Marvel (2019), Black Widow (2021), Eternals (2021), Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) and The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025), along with various sequels to these.
Thunderbolts are a Marvel Comics superhero team that date back to 1997. The original Thunderbolts were a team that stepped into the fray after The Avengers were declared dead, before a twist at the end of the original run revealed they were disguised super-villains who had been brought together by Baron Zemo. There have since been several different incarnations of the Thunderbolts, although they have always been made up of either villains or ambiguous characters on the periphery. By contrast in the film, they become merely a bunch of oddball outsiders and none can be considered villains – Ava Starr was played as a villain in her previous film outing Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) but here is a less villainous character. Certainly, all of the characters here have been members of the comic-book Thunderbolts at various points, while Bucky Barnes did lead one team in a 2016 incarnation.
This is indicative of the mix and match attitude that The MCU has to its comic-book source material where characters are uprooted and their context often abandoned, simplified or severely rewritten. On the comic page, for instance, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine was an Italian contessa who was introduced as a member of S.H.I.E.L.D. back in 1967 and has appeared in various stories, occasionally been seen as a villain, even a Skrull impostor, and at one point a leader of the Thunderbolts, whereas in the film she becomes director of the CIA and an unambiguous villain. Robert Reynolds/The Sentry/The Void has a much more complex storyline in comics and is meant to be a middle-aged man who took a serum in the 1940s and became so powerful he erased all memory of himself from humanity. For me, The New Avengers will always be Steed, Purdy and Gambit, but in this case were a spinoff Marvel created in 2005 to fill the void following the disbanding of The Avengers and have undergone several reshuffles of face and continuity since. (Although the only actual member of The New Avengers on the comic-book page that we get here are Bucky and Yelena).
The Thunderbolts – (l to r) Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), John Walker (Wyatt Russell) and Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour)
Part of the question that needs be asked is who is Marvel serving these days? Marvel adaptations erupted on screens and were greeted by comic-book enthusiasts and geeks of all persuasion when they came out. Gradually, Disney and Marvel began to pivot towards other audiences, bringing in a need to appeal to diversity. The time when Marvel films were directed by people like Jon Favreau, Joss Whedon, James Gunn and Scott Derrickson who came grounded in a genre background and had a native enthusiasm for the material has passed. While some of the modern directors are stayovers – the Russo Brothers, James Gunn who hung around to 2023 to direct two Guardians of the Galaxy sequels – the last person of genre grounding to come into the MCU would be Sam Raimi with Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness (2022) and before that you would have to go back to Scott Derrickson with Doctor Strange. Instead, the directors these days are usually plucked from making a single indie hit and given their chance at the big time where their individuality seems to be regarded as disposable and they expected to follow marching orders from the massive Marvel Studios machine. The results are a series of blandly homogenous works generating MCU output but feeling as though all they are doing are feeding an audience and no longer being made by people who grew up loving the material.
Think back to Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Doctor Strange, Black Panther – all were great iconic characters and you were excited to see them come together and play off one another. Now think to every MCU superhero that has been introduced since the singularly dull Captain Marvel, is there a one of them that is distinctive enough or has the charisma to carry their own big screen film? Can you even remember a single one of the Eternals? Even when it comes to the Thunderbolts, it still feels like we are watching the scrappy dog ends of Marvel’s comic book offerings. The team even seem to regard themselves as second-rate losers – indeed, what we have feels more like a less overtly comedic version of Mystery Men (1999) rather than a full-fledged superhero line-up.
Modern Marvel movies also seem to regard the audience for The MCU brand as its own entity and have created a series of hermetically sealed works where one need to be caught in the echo chamber of watching endless tv series spinoffs to make sense of what is going on in their universe anymore. There are few of the modern MCU films that can be viewed as their own entities without the need to keep referring to some other aspects of canon – Thunderbolts* is not too bad in this regard, although you do need to have seen Black Widow to understand the Yelena and Alexei relationship, tv’s The Falcon and the Winter Solider (2021) to know who John Walker is and why he is wearing a Captain America suit, and remember Hannah John-Kamen’s forgettable appearance in Ant-Man and the Wasp.
Lewis Pullman as Bob
I have had little enthusiasm for the MCU since about 2021. Oddly the last once I liked was Black Widow to which Thunderbolts* acts as a direct follow-on (although I did have a liking for Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) just because it was so wacky). I didn’t go into Thunderbolts* with any great enthusiasm – certainly, it has been one of the lowest grossing of all the MCU films, currently sitting at 29th place just above Black Widow, which had its box-office curtailed because it was released during the pandemic simultaneously on Disney+. Director Jake Schreier had debuted with the very enjoyable Robot & Frank (2012) and then went on to Paper Towns (2015); on the other hand, he had yet to make a feature film in ten years since then during which he has been mostly employed directing episodic tv and music videos for Justin Bieber and Kanye West.
The surprise is that I enjoyed Thunderbolts* far more than I was expecting to. It starts strong with two great scenes. The first is with Florence Pugh conducting a skydive from atop the Merdeka 118, the world’s second tallest building in Kuala Lumpur, and then bursting into a laboratory, eliminating assorted security personnel, where the action is undercut by Pugh’s wry, self-reflexive delivery of the dialogue. Here and throughout Pugh gives a great performance. We then cut to the congressional enquiry where Julia Louis-Dreyfus, barely recognisable as Elaine from Seinfeld (1989-98), delivers a blistering and robust defence under interrogation. These are two fine performances that will anchor the show.
Thereafter, Thunderbolts* largely becomes a character driven work. The fun really begins about the twenty-minute point where the film brings the characters that will become the Thunderbolts together. Jake Schreier is clearly aiming for another Guardians of the Galaxy vibe. The film doesn’t quite hit that sweet spot but has an appealing quirkiness of its own as the squabbling team of misfits go into action. Much of the show in this regard ends up being owned by Florence Pugh and a highly entertaining David Harbour once he enters the fold.
It is the rarity of a MCU film that is driven by its characters and not the big fireworks. One only need compare Thunderbolts* to the previous MCU entry Captain America: Brave New World (2025) to get the difference – Brave New World felt like a patchwork creation comprised of plot ends that the MCU needed to bring together, characters that you needed to watch multiple tv series to make any sense of and a series of effects set-pieces that had been jammed on top. By contrast, Thunderbolts* is an amiable superheroic ensemble, an earthbound Guardians of the Galaxy Lite that gets there in most of its moments and has some fine performances on board. There are one or two fight sequences throughout, but it doesn’t bring out the effects fireworks in a big way until the climax where we get a requisite mass destruction sequence that does not too badly.
