Thunderbolts—or, as Marvel insists with a typographical smirk, Thunderbolts*—has arrived, trailing its asterisk like a bureaucratic footnote to the MCU’s ever-dwindling glory. One might have hoped this ragtag assembly of second-string superfolk would jolt the franchise out of its post-Endgame torpor, but alas, it’s less a thunderbolt than a damp sparkler, fizzling in the drizzle of diminishing returns.
Directed by Jake Schreier, who once gave us the quirky Robot & Frank, seems contractually obliged here to churn out Marvel’s latest house blend of quips and CGI rubble. The film gathers a motley crew of antiheroes—think Suicide Squad, but with more existential moping and fewer exploding heads. Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, the Black Widow’s gloomier sibling, leads the pack with a performance that’s equal parts magnetic and miserable, as if she’s just realized she’s signed up for three more of these. She’s joined by Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes, a super-soldier-turned-congressman (a career pivot that’s never explained, nor particularly funny), and David Harbour’s Red Guardian, a Russian lummox whose boisterous shtick feels like a vodka-soaked audition for a sitcom that never got greenlit. Wyatt Russell’s John Walker, Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost, and Olga Kurylenko’s Taskmaster round out the roster, each bringing their own flavour of trauma to the table, like a therapy group that accidentally wandered into a Michael Bay film.
The plot, such as it is, involves these misfits being duped into a death trap by Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, a CIA director with the moral compass of a reality TV producer. There’s something about a superhuman project called “Sentry,” a shadowy villain called “the Void,” and a lot of running around New York while buildings explode in that curiously bloodless way Marvel favours. It’s all terribly formulaic, as if the script—penned by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo—were generated by an AI trained on every team-up movie since The Avengers. The film’s much-vaunted focus on mental health, with characters navel-gazing about their childhood traumas, feels less like a bold thematic choice and more like a box to tick on the studio’s diversity-of-emotions checklist. “I’m just drifting,” Yelena laments, and one can’t help but nod in agreement, as the film itself drifts from one action set-piece to the next, each less memorable than the last.
Visually, Thunderbolts is as drab as a Soviet apartment block, with cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo—whose work on The Green Knight promised so much more—seemingly instructed to desaturate everything until it resembles a particularly grim Instagram filter. The action sequences, while competently staged, lack the verve to stand out in a genre that’s been flogging the same slow-motion bullet dodges for two decades. There’s a surreal climax that nods to Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich, which is at least a novelty, but it’s too little, too late, like finding a single truffle in a vat of processed cheese.
And yet, one must grudgingly admit, it’s not entirely awful. Pugh, lovely as she is bless her, carries the film with a sardonic charisma that almost makes you forget the script’s shortcomings. Harbour’s Red Guardian provides a few chuckles, particularly when he’s tossing Molotov cocktails from a limo like a caterer gone rogue. The asterisk in the title, revealed to be a coy wink at the team’s rebranding as “The New Avengers,” is a rare moment of self-awareness, though it mostly serves to remind us that Marvel’s best days were when the old Avengers were still around.
In the end, Thunderbolts is neither the franchise’s salvation nor its nadir—just another cog in the MCU’s relentless content machine, grinding on with the weary inevitability of a tax return. It’s watchable, in the way that a mildly diverting airport novel is readable, but it leaves you longing for the days when Marvel films felt like events rather than obligations. As Yelena might put it, staring into the void of her own ennui: “What’s the point?”.