I’m so exhausted by what the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has become. Save for the occasional bright spot, the MCU has been too messy, too unfocused and too overcrowded with Disney+ series you need to have seen to understand what’s going on in the movies, and it has come very close to losing my interest as a casual viewer. As someone who sees all of these films, writes about them, and then forgets about them until it’s time to prep for the next one, it was asking a lot of me to go back and watch the 2008 Incredible Hulk film to prepare for the new Captain America movie, for example. Hitting me like a wrecking ball when I was least expecting it, Jake Schreier’s Thunderbolts* arrives, and it’s easily the best thing to come out of the MCU since Avengers: Endgame. 

Fans of superhero movies can be rather sensitive about spoilers, and there is a lot going on in Thunderbolts*. A lot that is spoiler-y. As always, today’s review will be spoiler free. I will not reveal anything not already revealed by the trailers and the ad campaign. But if you want to go in knowing as little as possible, which I think you should, maybe wait to read this review until after you’ve seen the movie, and then you can tell me why I’m wrong! Okay, let’s talk Thunderbolts*. 

Valentina (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is facing impeachment as head of the CIA, and is looking to tie up some loose ends and bury some incriminating evidence. She assigns Yelena (Florence Pugh), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) to a building she plans to blow up. However, once they all arrive and realize they have all been sent there by Valentina to kill each other, they decide to team up and flip the script on her. Also this guy Bob (Lewis Pullman) is there, and he has no idea how he got there or why. Yelena’s father, the Red Guardian (David Harbour) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), also have grievances with Valentina, and they come along for the ride as well.

I was shocked by how much I enjoyed Thunderbolts* and how it vehemently avoids being the kind of movie you think it’s going to be going in. I thought, if we’re lucky, this will be like Guardians of the Galaxy-lite. It’ll be fun, quippy, enjoyable and maybe will lead to better things moving forward. Instead, Thunderbolts* packs the emotional depth of Guardians 3 into its first movie, telling a heart-wrenching story about grief, trauma, regret and ultimately depression. The way the film visualizes the concept of ‘the void’ where one shoves all the emotions that are inconvenient, is breathtaking. Maybe it’s just because I didn’t know that’s where we were going here, maybe the storytelling really is that good, I’m not sure, and I’ll have to decide after a couple rewatches, but I was kind of blown away by the emotional maturity in this script. My favorite Marvel movies are the ones that are actually about people, and the CGI-heavy action sequences are not the primary focus, and that’s exactly what Thunderbolts* offers. 

Florence Pugh has done enough in film to make me think she can do no wrong, and she is an actress who has not yet hit age 30. Yelena was introduced in 2021’s Black Widow as Natasha’s sister, and while I enjoyed a lot about that performance, Thunderbolts* really puts Yelena at the center in a way Pugh was certainly game for. More than anything else, this film feels like a character study about what Yelena has experienced since the death of her sister, and the regret and pain she still holds, and tries to suppress, but as the film goes on, realizes she can’t. Her chemistry with David Harbour, returning as her father, is finely detailed and feels genuine. There’s some banter and lots of quips, but there’s emotionally difficult, unspoken tensions between these two, and the way this film explores that relationship, felt extremely compelling to me.

The film’s second most exciting performance comes from Lewis Pullman, but the less I tell you about it, the better. Suffice to say Pullman has a lot of rich, emotionally complex material to work with and you deeply care for this character by the time we reach the finish line. I also really enjoyed what Julia Louis-Dreyfus was doing here, even if she’s doing a sort of ultra evil Selina Meyer. She’s just so much fun to watch and makes for a really enjoyable villain. I also really enjoyed Sebastian Stan here, reprising his iconic role as Bucky, the Winter Soldier. He’s not the primary focus here, but Stan is an incredibly magnetic performer and he makes the most of his abbreviated role. Hannah John-Kamen reprises a role from the second Ant-Man movie, and she’s got some cool powers, but doesn’t factor into the overall emotional story this film is telling very much. And somehow, Wyatt Russell, reprising the role of the anti-Captain America from the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, has one of the better character evolutions here, and I was fully rooting for him by the end, which I was not expecting. 

Eric Pearson, who has worked on the writing staff for several MCU projects, alongside Joanna Calo, who has mostly worked in television, penned the script here, and it’s clear this story has a distinct point of view, rather than the convoluted mess that can happen when these scripts have five or more credited screenwriters. And Jake Schreier, an indie filmmaker perhaps best known for the Netflix series Beef, directs here. Schreier and Calo worked together on Beef, and teaming them with Pearson, who has a Marvel track record, feels like a smart choice. Even without focusing on the writing, which is the film’s strongest aspect, there’s a lot of tangible practicality in the fight sequences here and there’s a lot of cool camerawork, involving some extended tracking shots from cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo, that stop just short of feeling showy. But hell, considering what the MCU has been churning out lately, I’ll take showy.

Thunderbolts* is a perfectly fun and exciting four-quadrant summer blockbuster on its surface, but beneath the glossy slipcover is a powerful story about trauma, grief, regret and the emotional wounds the average superhero is too busy to attend to. It’s about the importance of the group and the found family dynamic, and it miraculously never gets bogged down in the trappings of the superhero movie that have exhausted me as a viewer over the last several MCU projects. I make this sound like heady, emotionally intense stuff, but more than anything else it’s a really fun time at the movies. It’s quick, it’s exciting and even breathless. It’s a popcorn movie with something on its mind. My favorite Marvel movies are those where the fate of the world isn’t at stake and where we don’t get lost in the ones and zeroes of inscrutable CGI. My favorite Marvel movies are the ones where the stakes feel grounded and human being sized, where primarily we’re being told a story about people. And that’s exactly what we have in Thunderbolts*. It’s emotionally charged and thrilling from start to finish.

Oh, and the asterisk in the title – it serves a very real purpose and I’m not going to tell you what it is. Yes, even the punctuation is a spoiler. But it’s a piece of movie title punctuation that I very much appreciate and endorse.