Main cast: Florence Pugh (Yelena Belova), Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier), Wyatt Russell (John Walker/US Agent), Olga Kurylenko (Antonia Dreykov/Taskmaster), Lewis Pullman (Robert Reynolds/Sentry), Geraldine Viswanathan (Mel), Chris Bauer (Holt), Wendell Pierce (Congressman Gary), David Harbour (Alexei Shostakov), Hannah John-Kamen (Ava Starr/Ghost), and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Valentina Allegra de Fontaine)
Director: Jake Schreier
Ah, Thunderbolts*. That asterisk is doing some very heavy lifting. It stands for “Look, these people technically aren’t the new Avengers, but we’re going to pretend like they are because the real Avengers would rather eat glass than show up for this!” in the fine print.
On paper, this film reads like a fun, gritty ensemble romp.
In practice, it feels like Marvel Studios found a clearance bin labeled “C-tier characters no one asked for” and decided to make a movie out of it. The only vaguely familiar face is Bucky Barnes, forced to slum it with these glorified background extras so someone, somewhere, could point at the poster and go, “Hey, it’s the Winter Soldier! That’s a character I recognize!”
And the rest? Discount Black Widow (who comes with all the sass, none of the box office draw), Ghost — last seen phasing out of Ant-Man and the Wasp and apparently also of everyone’s memory — John Walker, the world’s most aggressively beige Captain America knockoff, and Taskmaster, who dies faster than you can say “Wait, weren’t you supposed to be cool?” Her teammates barely look up from their phones.
This stellar lineup — a term I use as loosely as the film’s plot cohesion — is sent to Malaysia on a CIA black ops mission by Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, a woman who looks like she should be sipping gin martinis in a villain’s lair while stroking a Persian cat, but is instead orchestrating international terrorism with all the menace of a school principal who just confiscated your vape pen.
In a “twist” so shocking it might register as a minor flicker of surprise if you’ve been in a coma since 2004, Valentina plans to kill them all to cover her tracks. Because nothing says cunning espionage like sending a group of unstable randos with severe PTSD on an unsanctioned mission and then double-crossing them. What could go wrong?
Along the way, they liberate Bob, a mysterious figure in suspended animation who, if you squint, you might mistake for an interesting plot device. Turns out Bob has the power to destroy the MCU itself. Which, given the franchise’s recent offerings, feels less like a threat and more like a mercy killing.
Now, if you’re thinking this all sounds delightfully bonkers, you’d be right.
Except it isn’t, because while the premise has the makings of a chaotic good time, the focus is on group therapy and the execution is about as lively as a Wednesday afternoon HR seminar on proper email etiquette.
This is because modern MCU movies operate on a sacred rule: thou shalt not allow the audience to feel anything for more than eight seconds. Every rare moment of genuine pathos — characters reckoning with their inner demons, grappling with trauma — is immediately deflated by five minutes of snarky, fourth-wall-adjacent quips so excruciatingly unfunny you’ll wish someone would phase you out of existence.
It’s like watching a therapy session run by people who learned about mental health from TikTok. Depression? Doomscrolling. PTSD? Turn off your phone and have a group hug. That’s the film’s solution to trauma: just log off, bestie. Mental health, brought to you by a boomer’s idea of what millennials are like: hyperverbal, emotionally stunted, and constitutionally incapable of not quipping.
To add insult to existential injury, the film skimps on action. Still, given the recent state of MCU CGI — best described as “PlayStation 2 cutscene” — this is probably a blessing. But it means you’re left alone with these charisma-deficient characters and their never-ending trauma circus, which would be fine if any of it had actual emotional depth. Instead, it’s all surface-level sadness undercut by sitcom banter.
The most terrifying part is that this movie is one of the better MCU films in recent memory. Not because it’s good, mind you — oh no — but because the bar has sunk so low it’s burrowing through the Earth’s mantle.
At least Thunderbolts* isn’t aggressively awful. It’s not an Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania or a Secret Invasion. It’s just… boring. A beige, middling, over-quipped, trauma-mining slog.
And in today’s Marvel, boring is practically a win.
