After finding themselves ensnared in a death trap, an unconventional team of antiheroes must embark on a dangerous mission that will force them to confront the darkest corners of their pasts. Thunderbolts* is directed by Jake Schreier and stars Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Sebastian Stan, Russell Wyatt, Hannah John-Kamen and Lewis Pullman.
NOTE: This review contains spoilers. This is your final warning.
Dan Grote: “And there came a day, a day unlike any other, when Earth’s mightiest heroes found themselves united against a common threat.”
On that day, Nick Fury (Valentina Allegra de Fontaine) assembled (after unsuccessfully trying to get them to kill each other) Earth’s Mightiest (available) (anti-)Heroes to save New York City (via an Atlanta soundstage) from an invading force (Bob).
Behold: Five Below Captain America! Black Widow … ‘s sister and dad! An antagonist from Ant-Man and the Wasp you likely forgot about! Taskmaster, for all of five seconds! And of course, Bucky.
I’m opening with sarcasm, but honestly, I liked this movie. Austin, did you have a pleasurable MCU-going experience this weekend?
Austin Gorton: Poor Taskmaster/Olga Kurylenko. From mostly mute, mostly bland hench in Black Widow to not even officially making it onto the team, even briefly, in Thunderbolts*. George Perez and David Michelinie’s henchman trainer deserves better.
That aside, yes! I enjoyed this quite a bit, in part because it found a way to both lean into the strengths and sidestep the flaws of the MCU in some interesting ways. Is it a success that is replicable? Probably not (if for no other reason than the fact that not every MCU film can be anchored by Florence Pugh). But it definitely leaves me feeling better about the state of the MCU heading into Fantastic Four: First Steps than Captain America: Brave New World did.
Avengers (2012) redux
Dan: The parallels with the first Avengers movie are plentiful and intentional, though one could argue the callbacks to earlier, in some cases better MCU movies don’t stop there. The ragtag group of quippy sketchballs who band together to save the day is pure Guardians of the Galaxy. Three characters in this movie are callbacks to Black Widow. It references the Red Hulk from Brave New World. And of course, an overpowered guy who can make people disappear is just Thanos.
That’s not to say Thunderbolts* (and yes, the asterisk is load-bearing) is a total ’member berry. But it is to say it feels like the MCU found a way to take “[deep sigh] Look, this is who we’ve got, OK?” and make a movie out of it. Some of the best episodes of Disney+’s What If…? were made that way, including an episode starring two of the leads of this movie (Season 3’s “What if the Red Guardian Stopped the Winter Soldier” is the dumb buddy action-comedy I didn’t know I needed).
Austin: This read to me like one of the examples of the movie making one of the flaws of the current MCU into a strength. Rather than try to suggest the legacy characters it’s stuck with are secretly awesome, it says, “we know these characters aren’t great, but it’s what we’ve got, so let’s have some fun.” And in the process, it makes them … well, not awesome, but better. Certainly entertaining.
Dan: Certainly. Thunderbolts* is about broken people existing in a broken IP franchise. When characters ask, “Where are the Avengers,” what we as the viewers ask is “Where are the movies that made this franchise great in the first place,” the ones that relied on story and building a world instead of cheap-and-easy pulls from the multiverse, as half of the post-Avengers: Endgame movies have done. Our antagonist, Valentina, seizes on that, in an end-of-movie twist that can best be described as “We have Avengers at home.”
Austin: Val is Kevin Feige. And I don’t mean that in a cynical “Kevin Feige has lost it” kind of way. Val is the villain, but also, in the end, she wins (apt for a movie that, however distantly, takes its inspiration from a group of villains masquerading as heroes). She gets her public-facing heroes, her New Avengers, just like Kevin gets some characters who audiences just might be excited to see show up again.
Dan: That’s a great comparison, and a fascinating lead-in to a discussion for another time about whether Feige has lived long enough to see himself become the villain. That turn may have happened the moment he showed up at the first Hellfire Gala.
Nevertheless, this movie was well-acted, it was fun, it didn’t take itself too seriously, and it featured one of my favorite action-movie tropes that gets me every time: a vehicle blowing up in such a way that it flips forward end over end. They did it with a limo this time!
Austin: Meanwhile, I am a sucker for the too-cool-for-school one-handed shotgun flip. Too many adolescent nights spent watching Terminator 2.
Dan: Cyborgs. They know how to flip a gun.
Austin: Beyond the tropes, this movie is one of the better “action” movies in the MCU stable. Whereas far too many action scenes in Marvel movies feel like they’re there because the laws of action summer blockbuster filmmaking require an action scene every X minutes, the action scenes here manage to propel both plot and character. Yelena gets an opening hallway fight that seems like a direct echo of Black Widow’s introduction in Iron Man 2, only this one is way more lethal and less showy. The initial melee among the future Thunderbolts (RIP Taskmaster) isn’t just there ’cuz it’s time for action, but because those are all characters whose principal language is violence, so that’s where they start. When Bucky shows up and tosses his shotgun and flips the limo, it establishes him as the “dad” of the group. Sentry mopping the floor with the Thunderbolts on Val’s orders makes it clear this isn’t a movie that’s going to end with punching, because none of these “Avengers” can stand up to a Thanos-level threat like, say, Thor could.
Black Widow (2021) walked …
Dan: Much of the plot and cast of this movie owes itself to 2021’s Black Widow, a movie that was initially supposed to come out at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic but instead came out when things were still bad but the vaccines were out and the apathy had long since set in. Austin, what do you remember about that movie?
Austin: I’m pretty sure it was the first movie I saw in theaters post-COVID? And that it’s ultimately the Secret Origin of Black Widow’s Infinity War Tactical Vest.
Dan: And her blond hair! But yeah, otherwise, I don’t remember much about it. What I do remember is that the best parts of it had nothing to do with Scarlett Johansson and everything to do with a fresh-off-Midsommar Florence Pugh as her still-unpacking-her-Red-Room-shit kid sister and David Harbour as her easily excitable, nostalgia-trapped, glory-loving adoptive father. And Rachel Weisz, but she’s not in this movie.
Austin: There’s a reason Pugh and Harbour are here, as they are easily the most memorable things about Black Widow, one of the MCU movies that plays better as a basic cable background movie than it did in the theater.
Dan: Pugh’s and Harbour’s performances were so memorable and so fun that they helped create one of the traps the post-Endgame MCU has fallen into. Without recasting, the studio has to find new, non-Steve Rogers-and-Tony Stark characters for fans to cheer for, but they’re characters that don’t sell — to steal an example from the movie — Wheaties boxes. Outside of conventions, are you going to see kids dressing up as White Widow or Red Guardian?
Pugh, at the center of it, is the actress who is too good for the material she’s been given. Yelena Belova has become the disaster-millennial kid sister/POV character for a modern era. Her short life has had one too many historical tragedies in it. She’s depressed. She can’t figure her way out of the river of shit, and the forces at play around her want to keep her there. The character she vibes with the most in the movie is a bipolar former meth addict who can’t get past his own trauma. If these aren’t 2025 vibes, then what are?
Austin: Well said.
It’s tough to overstate how good Pugh is in carrying this movie. Going from the edgy shit stirrer to the moral center of a story is a tough transition to land without losing what makes the character engaging in the first place, but she pulls it off. Her bond with Bob is believable, as is the moment when she accepts she can’t baton her way to victory and surrenders to the Void.
Dan: And a thing about Harbour is, as much as we root for him as the put-upon straight-man Sheriff Hopper on Stranger Things, outside of that, he’s actually a bit of a weirdo, and Thunderbolts* lets him lean into that, to make his co-stars groan while he metaphorically screams “Let’s f***ing go” in Russian at every opportunity. Not since Will Ferrell in Old School has a post-credit grocery aisle scene been so fun.
Austin: And what’s great is he still has that bit of Hopper-esque Big Dad energy. He’s a Soccer Dad with too much enthusiasm and super-strength.
Dan: There are more acting accolades to go around, though. Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ comedic chops cannot be dismissed as the conniving Valentina, a Nick Fury who in some ways is more dangerous because she knows how to play all sides off the middle.
Austin: Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a goddamn national treasure.
Dan: Hell yeah! Lewis Pullman is at his most convincing as the affable but clearly deeply troubled Bob, before the movie gets bogged down in the same Sentry/Void nonsense that plagued much of 2000s event comics (Seriously, if you’re new to the character, don’t Google him; the Phoenix Force makes more sense). Sebastian Stan is starting to look like he’s been in this franchise for more than a decade, bringing an air of “I’m getting too old for this shit” to Bucky as he pulls his cybernetic arm out of the dishwasher. Still, he knows what he signed on for, and he’s still got a couple more of these in his contract before he can ride off into the sunset, flipping shotguns with one hand as he goes. Am I missing anybody?
Austin: He gets a little lost amid the big energy of his co-stars, but Wyatt Russell deserves a shoutout for effectively balancing the genuine heroism and genuine asshole-ism that is at the heart of USAgent’s character. He was one of the better parts of the not-terribly-great Falcon and The Winter Soldier, and I’m glad he’s getting a chance to do his thing in a better project.
Really, the whole cast is aces, including Miracle Workers vet Geraldine Viswanathan as Mel, Val’s put-upon Maria Hill. Though Hannah John-Kamen largely gets the short end of the stick as Ghost, the one character the movie doesn’t seem to have enough time for.
Dan: Honestly, Ant-Man and the Wasp didn’t have enough time for her. How are you gonna be in a movie with Paul Rudd, Randall Park, Laurence Fishburne and Walton F’ing Goggins and think you’re getting meaningful screen time?
Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now
Dan: The final battle starts out fairly cut-and-paste from other MCU fare — a CGI-heavy soundstage battle in the streets of a major city against an Evil Superman-level threat, with shots of the characters Saving the Cat and each other. There’s a deeper theme at play about mental health and trauma that the movie is at its best when it’s addressing head on, and group therapy is in part what defeats the big bad as opposed to punching, leading to the final-scene reveal that our anti-heroes will henceforth be known as the New Avengers, a status quo shift that could make for good storytelling as we head into the era of Doom. You could say this is the beginning of Valentina’s … Dark Reign?
[Puts on sunglasses, walks away as car explodes, flipping forward end over end. Then realizes we’re not done yet, takes off sunglasses and sits back down.]
Austin: I would argue one of this movie’s strengths is that its climax isn’t a cut-and-paste “fight some guys to stop a big beam of energy in the sky” MCU-style climax. The big action scene at the end is, basically, Sentry tossing around the Thunderbolts, followed by some routine “save people from falling debris” moments (which helps sell their later presentation as the kinda, sorta Avengers to the public). But the resolution to the Sentry/Void’s threat ultimately boils down to characters coming to terms with their trauma, or at least accepting that they don’t need to carry the weight of those traumas alone. It’s another example of the movie recognizing one of the flaws of the MCU — too many generic CGI climaxes — and steering away from it for success.
Dan: But the final post-credit scene is a great reminder that we’re really more interested in what comes next. Ever since we saw Ebon Moss-Bacharach’s CGI Thing taste-test that sauce alongside H.E.R.B.I.E. in that first trailer, we knew Fantastic Four: First Steps was going to be something special. It may have taken a few false starts to get us there, but we’re closer than we’ve ever been. Daddy is calling us home. Austin, what’s your excitement level headed into FF?
Austin: I am an Old, and thus, remember well earlier waves of comic book movies, when creators and studio execs still seemed ashamed/afraid of the more overtly comic book-y elements of the stories they were telling. Which is to say, an FF movie where Galactus is a giant guy with purple pants and not a big cloud? Sign me the hell up.
Also, Silver Surfer is a lady and that’s pissing off a bunch of internet chuds, so yay for that.
Dan Grote is the editor and publisher of ComicsXF, having won the site by ritual combat. By day, he’s a newspaper editor, and by night, he’s … also an editor. He co-hosts The ComicsXF Interview Podcast with Matt Lazorwitz. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two kids and two miniature dachshunds, and his third, fictional son, Peter Paul Winston Wisdom. Follow him @danielpgrote.bsky.social.
Austin Gorton also reviews older issues of X-Men at the Real Gentlemen of Leisure website, co-hosts the A Very Special episode podcast, and likes Star Wars. He lives outside Minneapolis, where sometimes, it is not cold. Follow him @austingorton.bsky.social.
