by Tim Gordon
Every so often, Marvel likes to remind us that it can get a little darker, a little messier, and a little more morally complicated than its usual candy-colored heroics. Thunderbolts* is supposed to be one of those reminders, a chance to pull together the MCU’s rogues and antiheroes into a grittier, greyer mission that asks what happens when the people we’ve used up and discarded have to work together to clean up someone else’s mess.
Directed by Jake Schreier and penned by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, Thunderbolts tries to give us a taste of that, but instead ends up being a cautionary tale about what happens when your ambitions run ahead of your execution. It’s a film with a fascinating setup, a sharp cast, and just enough real-world cynicism to feel relevant, but it never quite figures out how to bring all those elements home.
So here’s the pitch: Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh, still the best thing about Marvel’s post-Black Widow era) is doing dirty work for Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ deliciously shady CIA puppet master. Yelena blows up a secret lab in Malaysia to cover up de Fontaine’s fingerprints on the “Sentry” program, but she and her fellow expendables quickly find out they’ve been double-crossed.
The twist? They were meant to kill each other and be erased along with the evidence. Instead, they get stuck with Bob, an amnesiac man who was part of the Sentry experiments and ends up unleashing a whole new threat when he transforms into the Void, an entity that’s the physical manifestation of his trauma and mental fractures.
On paper, that’s a story that should work. It’s got betrayal, broken alliances, a Frankenstein’s monster who never asked to be created, and a group of misfits forced to figure out if they’re monsters or something more. You can feel Winter Soldier and The Suicide Squad lurking in its DNA, the promise of a tighter, morally ambiguous espionage thriller where no one’s the good guy.
But here’s the thing: it never fully commits.
Part of the problem is that the Thunderbolts, Yelena, John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), Antonia Dreykov, and eventually Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) never really gel in a way that feels earned. You’d think you’d want these people in a room together to work out their demons — all the betrayal, the regrets, the fear of being used up by the system again. But the film rushes through what should be its most interesting conversations.
Florence Pugh does what she always does: she brings layers to Yelena’s toughness, reminding you that this is someone always trying to outrun her childhood and her mistakes. Wyatt Russell’s Walker remains an interesting wildcard, a man so desperate to be a hero he doesn’t know when he’s being played. Sebastian Stan’s Bucky shows up late, trying to inject some moral center into the group, but by then it feels like the movie’s already moved on.
And Bob, this tragic, unstable man who becomes the Void, could have been one of Marvel’s most unsettling villains if they’d let him breathe. There’s something poignant about a man who becomes a god-like threat because the system broke him and then buried him alive in a tube. But the third act rushes through his transformation into a standard CGI threat engulfing New York City in darkness, you know, the usual.
If there’s one character who deserved a bigger payoff, it’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Valentina. She’s a snake, and she knows she’s a snake, but she’s also smart enough to keep slipping away when her plots fall apart. The film tries to use her as the stand-in for how governments chew people up and spit them out in the name of national security, but that commentary ends up toothless. She slithers away, unresolved, as if the movie remembers she’ll be needed to cause trouble later.
What keeps Thunderbolts from landing is that it’s fighting itself tonally. Sometimes it wants to be a dark psychological thriller when Yelena and Walker touch Bob and see visions of their worst traumas, you can see the film flirting with real horror. Other times, it snaps back into typical Marvel quipping, which undercuts any tension the story might build.
There’s also some genuinely cool visual flair when the Void starts consuming the city, the idea of people trapped in pocket dimensions is pure nightmare fuel, but the film doesn’t sit with the horror long enough to let it get under your skin. Instead, it races to the next franchise tease.
In the end, Thunderbolts is a film with the right ingredients but the wrong recipe. It wants to be a story about broken people used by a broken system, about how you can’t keep turning people into weapons without consequence. But instead of letting that story breathe, it gets bogged down in setting up the next big thing: the Watchtower, the Sentry program, maybe a bigger fight down the line.
It’s not unwatchable. Florence Pugh continues to be a bright spot in the MCU, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus could sell snake oil to a snake. But the rest of the team deserves better than to feel like puzzle pieces forced onto the same board.
So if you’re here for a sharp, character-driven antihero thriller, you might leave disappointed. But if you’re here to collect breadcrumbs for whatever Marvel’s building next, well, you’ll get just enough to keep you hooked.
Grade: C+
