REVIEW: Can Marvel's 'Thunderbolts*' save the MCU?

Thank goodness, then, for Florence Pugh (Black Widow, Midsommar). Sure, the new movie may be titled, Thunderbolts*, but let’s be clear: this is Pugh’s show, and she automatically elevates everyone and everything around her by virtue of being in it. Having first suited up in 2021’s Black Widow as the younger sister of Scarlett Johansson’s titular superspy, Pugh brought a fresh (if sardonic) energy to the franchise. Her Yelena would return in that year’s highly enjoyable Hawkeye TV series, butting heads with fellow legacy character Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld, Sinners).

Thunderbolts* finds Yelena at the end of her rope; a lifetime of covert ops and the death of Natasha have left her numb, and she’s searching for a reason to keep going. When her current employer assigns her one last mission, Yelena finds herself among other disenfranchised agents. The second-tier supers include former SHIELD asset, Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen); disgraced super soldier and one-time Captain America, John Walker (Wyatt Russel); and the (somewhat) reformed Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko). The group is rounded out by Yelena’s wayward father, Alexie (David Harbour) and the erstwhile Winter Soldier himself, Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan). 

And then we have Bob (Lewis Pullman), a genial, soft-spoken everyman who randomly shows up in the middle of a brawl, representing a riddle in need of solving. Having already (coincidentally) played a genial, soft-spoken Bob in Top Gun: Maverick back in 2022, Pullman’s portrayal here is likeable in an entirely different way. Affable to a T, Bob’s easygoing exterior belies the pain behind his eyes. It is a pain that Yelena knows all too well, and the two establish a rapport. As she, Bob, and their reluctant companions attempt to make sense of the situation, the newly christened Thunderbolts will need to work together to survive.

The notion of processing trauma to drive character development gives Yelena and her cohorts a level of relatability uncommon to most big budget blockbusters. While mental health was touched upon in Iron Man 3 (Tony’s PTSD), Wakanda Forever (grieving T’Challa’s loss), and Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (generational trauma), the MCU’s deepest exploration thus far has been on the small screen, by way of Wandavision and Moon Knight on DisneyPlus. 

Where Avengers: Endgame infamously reduced Thor’s depression to a glorified fat joke, Thunderbolts* openly explores its characters’ respective conditions. Where the former used trauma as a punchline, the latter addresses it head-on, oftentimes literally. Depression is an all-too-real condition, and the movie does well in highlighting the power of surrounding oneself with the right people to confront it. The fact that Yelena, unlike her sister, is willing to seek out and accept help from others says volumes about both characters.

It helps, too, that the Thunderbolts themselves are presented in all their flawed glory—these aren’t the Avengers, not by a long shot. With the script constantly referencing their C-list status and mortality, it’s easy to root for them in a way that wouldn’t necessarily ring true for, say, a Norse god or a green rage monster. Unfortunately, much of what pains them is left largely unexplained, requiring a working knowledge of the MCU that the average moviegoer might not necessarily have. While the film does provide snarky, one-liner summaries, it’s one thing to know Sam Wilson, but quite another to understand John Walker’s crimes without having seen the Falcon and the Winter Soldier TV series. Heck, Ghost was the main villain in Ant-Man and The Wasp, and most people still had to Google her when the first trailers for Thunderbolts* dropped. And does anyone have a good answer for why (or how) Bucky—a known terrorist asset for decades—became a congressman? Diehards may get a kick out of all this, but one longs for when watching these things didn’t feel like homework.

Required viewing aside, Pugh and Pullman steal the show through the combined forces of their formidable acting abilities. Yelena and Bob’s bond makes the team chemistry work, and it’s their interactions that will have everyone talking. Good thing, too, as Sebastian Stan’s lone wolf shtick (introduced back in 2014’s Captain America:The Winter Soldier) is wearing thin, while Harbour’s decision to act like a human cartoon continues to defy explanation. It’s entertaining enough, to be sure, but how does it help his character? Indeed, his most resonant sequence comes when Alexie believes he’s lost Yelena: for one brief moment, the Russian caricature disappears, replaced by a father grappling with unimaginable grief—it’s raw, primal, and Harbour acts the hell out of it. The next time we see him, he’s beating up pillows.

All told, Thunderbolts* delivers a good, if uneven, time that speeds the MCU towards a new status quo. How long this will last is anybody’s guess, but given the pending arrivals of July’s Fantastic Four and 2026’s Avengers: Doomsday, there’s a very real danger of Yelena’s team being relegated to Earth’s Mightiest placeholders. Could something more substantive have been made if the post-Endgame roadmap hadn’t been hit by a global pandemic, or if Disney+’s launch hadn’t spread the MCU too thin? What if Hollywood’s actors and writers hadn’t spent 2023 on strike, or if Jonathan Majors wasn’t a garbage human, who knows how things could have turned out? Maybe we’d be celebrating the triumph of the Thunderbolts*, instead of mourning what could have been.

In the film that we did get, there is a scene where a timer counts down to the Thunderbolts’ incineration. At the four-second mark, Yelena closes her eyes, embracing the finality of oblivion with the knowledge that, whatever happens, it’s out of her hands. One wonders if we haven’t reached that point yet with the MCU in general.

At least it wasn’t another multiverse movie.