Thunderbolts* Review: Marvel Finally Matures Its Cinematic Universe With An Emotional Gut Punch

Stop me if you've heard this before — a motley crew of rejects are forced to team up and save the day, despite everyone who encounters them thinking they're doomed to fail. In the war classic "The Dirty Dozen," it's a pack of prisoners tasked with a suicide mission to kill Nazis in World War II. In the "Guardians of the Galaxy" trilogy, it's a bunch of ragtag would-be heroes with quirky personalities and quippy vocabularies saving the universe. In "The Suicide Squad," it's "The Dirty Dozen" but with supervillains directed by the guy who made the "Guardians of the Galaxy" films. But with "Thunderbolts*," it's a lineup of rejected mercenaries and social pariahs with superpowers who have to save themselves before they could ever hope to be useful to anyone else.

It's also one of the best films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, namely because it doesn't feel like something from the current era of MCU cinema.

The Thunderbolts*, named for the perfect losing season pee-wee soccer team (sponsored by Stan's Tires) that Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) played on as a child, include the aforementioned adoptive sister of Black Widow, Winter Soldier turned Congressman Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), the dishonorably discharged John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) who finally has her molecular disequilibrium under control, Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), and the aging Russian super soldier Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour), who has fully leaned into his embarrassing dad era.

And then there's Bob (Lewis Pullman), a seemingly regular ol' guy with some serious mental health issues who crosses paths with the crew after Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Valentina Allegra de Fontaine thrusts them all into a deadly trap. United we stand, divided we fall, or whatever, but the titular "Thunderbolts*" work together not out of obligation or order — but because that's the only way any of us can hope to survive the hellscape that is existence. The result is a genuinely human tale of supercharged antiheroes, and an exploration of how exposure to non-stop violence can cause permanent psychic damage.

Whether or not it's an entirely fair criticism is subjective, but there's an assumption that when acclaimed actors sign onto a superhero film, they're "slumming it." But as superhero films continue to evolve, so too do the demands of the actors on screen. The marketing might be heavily focused on Bucky Barnes, but make no mistake, the true leader of the Thunderbolts* is Yelena, and Florence Pugh's performance is sincerely one of her very best. With her expressive face and innate ability to pull in the audience and feel what she feels, she delivers arguably the strongest lead performance in an MCU film since "Avengers: Endgame." (Note: I said "film," if we're including television, that honor goes to Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch on "WandaVision," don't @ me.)

There are plenty of fight sequences and flashy set pieces (stunt coordinator Heidi Moneymaker really brought her A-game on this one) to fulfill the requisite action quota, but Pugh is the emotional anchor that elevates this beyond the usual capes & tights fare. The MCU has been desperately looking for (and struggling to find) its new pillars to replace The Avengers, and "Thunderbolts*" proves that Yelena is the damn support beam. As is the case with all Marvel movies, the message can get a little heavy-handed at times, but no matter how often Yelena unloads a self-deprecating criticism of herself or allows imposter syndrome to take the wheel, it always feels genuine because no one else is operating on the same level as Pugh.

Despite being a superhero movie, "Thunderbolts*" is visually cold, bleak, and denuded — which is thematically appropriate for the film's central themes of loneliness, grief, regret, PTSD, and learning how to let yourself be cared about. It's also a key reflection of the film's major baddies, the personification of government corruption incarnate, known as Valentina de Fontaine, and Bob/Sentry/The Void. Valentina uses her government position and power to force the Thunderbolts* to do her bidding, not unlike the way government systems across the globe prey on and exploit their most vulnerable communities. Louis-Dreyfus is essentially playing the Walugi version of Selina Meyer from "Veep," and it's a perfect fit for her. She's poison behind a pointed smile on her way to tiptoe the tightrope of Aryan eugenics. 

But the real standout is Lewis Pullman as Sentry/The Void, who might as well be "Bipolar Disorder: The Supervillain." He is commanding as he fluctuates between three different versions of the same character, and the fact that his genes evoke the memory of other beloved characters only adds another layer to his mesmerizing performance. Thanos might have been a larger threat in the sense of a galactic war, but The Void genuinely terrifies me because he represents an anxiety that many of us fight every single day — the idea that we too, by simply existing, will poison everything and everyone that gets near us with our misery ... even if we don't want it to happen. The Void is a horrifying villain because he doesn't work with explosions or aggression; he merely blots you into nothingness from the outside, while inside, you're trapped in a labyrinthian prison of your own subconscious making. He practically triggers an existential crisis just by looking at him.

Pullman has been battling the "only got the role because of nepotism" allegations for a while now, but "Thunderbolts*" should shut the naysayers up. He's got the goods.

For as understated albeit serious in tone and theme as "Thunderbolts*" is, the film is also ripe with the usual MCU banter fans expect. Fortunately, the humor is launched as a storytelling tool to balance the darkness. The combination of Marvel mainstay Eric Pearson with Joanna Calo of "BoJack Horseman," "Hacks," and "The Bear" fame as the minds behind the script was clearly a winning combination, and one the MCU should highly consider trying to replicate moving forward.

When the world is terrible, a lot of people turn to fantastical escapism to shut out the reality of their situation. Me? All I want to do is watch movies about people who feel terrible and learn how to survive in the face of all the terrible. "Thunderbolts* delivers exactly that, and provides a spoonful of laugh-out-loud moments of sugar from David Harbour to help make the medicine go down. It's a self-aware, serious, action-comedy that never sacrifices story to make its point, and never talks down to the audience even if it has to be a bit more obvious for four-quadrant viewers.

"Thunderbolts*" is exactly the type of movie the MCU needs right now, but after a losing streak of less-than-stellar performances, I fear that audiences won't turn out for the second-string players, which will only send the message to the powers at be to go back to the boring, safe, well of familiarity. But I hope I'm wrong. I hope that "Thunderbolts*" overperforms at the box office and helps usher in a new era of Marvel movies that allows actors to act, stakes to be raised by putting characters in tangible environments instead of CGI hellscapes, characters that force us to flex our empathy muscles, and Florence Pugh leading the way.

/Film Rating: 7 out of 10

"Thunderbolts*" opens in theaters on May 2, 2025.