30 Apr REVIEW – ‘Thunderbolts*’ is one of the best MCU films of recent times
Let’s be real: no one expected Thunderbolts* to go this hard. Conceived as the MCU’s answer to The Suicide Squad or a replacement for the Guardians of the Galaxy, the film always risked becoming Marvel’s dumping ground for its least resolved B-players, a franchise palate-cleanser no one asked for. But under the direction of Thunderbolts* and a committed ensemble that works overtime to tether the bombast to something bruised and recognisably human, Thunderbolts* turns out to be something else entirely: a surprisingly moving, often funny, and at times genuinely existential entry in the ever-widening Marvel canon. Yes, it still indulges in the obligatory CGI third-act mayhem. And no, not every thread is pulled as tight as it should be. But what elevates Thunderbolts* above the sum of its parts is the sincerity with which it interrogates its central question: if you were built for violence, what the hell do you do when the fighting ends?
Rather than kicking off with an epic explosion or world-ending threat, Thunderbolts* opens on an exhausted ex-assassin dangling a man out a window. It’s Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), and she’s in the middle of what appears to be yet another off-books job for CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), who is as slippery and bureaucratically untouchable as ever. But the look in Yelena’s eyes isn’t one of menace; it’s pure malaise. She’s burned out, philosophically adrift, and she’s not the only one.
Enter a small parade of aimless antiheroes: the glum and guilt-ridden Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), the swaggering Red Guardian (David Harbour) with a heart of mushy Soviet gold, the icy and mute Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), the molecularly unstable Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and the chronically overcompensating John Walker/U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell). All of them former villains, tools, soldiers, or washouts. All of them grappling with the question of what remains when usefulness expires.
Their connection is stitched together by a mission that begins as a straightforward op and unravels into something darker and more personal. Through a series of betrayals, false leads, and unexpected alliances, the group discovers they’ve all been pawns in a much larger scheme orchestrated by Valentina, one that involves experimental enhancements, erased memories, and the horrifying prospect of erasing inconvenient lives to preserve government secrets.
Along the way, they encounter Bob (Lewis Pullman), a mysterious and softly-spoken man with a blank past and a terrifying future. Bob’s presence (and what he becomes) forces the team to reckon with their own pasts, their culpability, and their lingering traumas. What could have been a cut-and-paste retrieval mission instead evolves into a story about loyalty, grief, and redemption, told through characters who’ve long been treated as narrative leftovers.
Pugh leads the charge with the kind of performance that makes you wish the MCU had let her cook years ago. Her Yelena is jaded but tender, broken but unbowed; a rare character in this cinematic universe who can oscillate between gallows humour and genuine pain without losing coherence. Her rapport with Harbour’s Red Guardian is as chaotic and warm as ever, but here it’s tinged with a mutual understanding of disappointment: in their careers, their country, and even in each other. Pugh doesn’t just play Yelena’s grief and disillusionment—she wears it in her posture, her line delivery, even the heaviness with which she moves through a world that has used her far too often.
It’s another reminder of what Pugh does so well: threading levity through sorrow, and finding dignity in the disoriented chaos of a character who doesn’t know who to trust—not even herself. There’s something moving about the way Yelena clings to control through her quick wit and cutting humour, only for the film to steadily peel those defences away. Much of Thunderbolts* ultimately rests on her shoulders, and she carries it with remarkable ease. In a film bursting with scene-stealers and tonal shifts, Pugh is the one who threads it all together, giving the film its bruised heart and fragile hope. It’s a performance that doesn’t ask for attention but demands it anyway—precise, unflashy, and quietly devastating.
Stan, meanwhile, turns in some of his best work as Bucky. His haunted stillness and quiet exasperation play beautifully off the rest of the ensemble, and the film finally gives him room to express something beyond regret. Russell is a standout, too. His John Walker is still an arrogant hammer in search of a nail, but there’s a self-awareness creeping in now, an uncomfortable itch of conscience that Russell plays with restraint and unease.
One of the great surprises of Thunderbolts* is how deftly it handles tonal shifts. Credit goes to Schreier, who keeps the emotional stakes grounded even when the visual effects start to take over. The first half of the film is breezy but never glib, with a dark sense of humour that reflects the characters’ cynicism and survival instincts. There’s a running joke involving Red Guardian’s obsession with his legacy that could have tipped into self-parody, but Harbour sells it with such wounded sincerity that it lands as a tragicomic refrain. And Louis-Dreyfus, finally given more to do than smirk enigmatically from a shadowy corner, turns Valentina into a quietly monstrous figure: a government stooge whose cheerful manipulation makes her more frightening than any alien warlord. Louis-Dreyfus sharpens every scene she’s in with a disarming mix of dry humour and calculated menace like only she can.
But it’s Pullman’s Bob who becomes the film’s moral and thematic centre. The rising star brings a sad, off-kilter gentleness to a character who could have easily been a plot device. His transformation into the Sentry, a being whose godlike power is rooted in deep psychological instability, is the film’s boldest and most affecting gambit. Bob’s descent isn’t just a metaphor for unchecked power; it’s an exploration of what happens when trauma is amplified instead of healed, when pain becomes power without purpose. The analogy occasionally veers into the on-the-nose (yes, his alter ego is literally called The Void), but Pullman’s performance keeps it honest. When Bob breaks, the film does too, and the ensuing chaos has a palpable emotional weight that most Marvel climaxes sorely lack.
Still, Thunderbolts* isn’t without its minor misfires. The film’s pacing occasionally stumbles, particularly in the second act, where a few scenes strain under the weight of exposition. Much like her appearance in Ant-Man and the Wasp, Ghost remains underwritten compared to their teammates. John-Kamen does what she can, but the script doesn’t seem quite sure what to do with her character beyond cool things to do in combat. There’s also the usual Marvel bloat: while the final showdown offers some genuinely jaw-dropping moments (Sentry’s midair god complex meltdown is particularly memorable), it also drags a bit longer than necessary, with some visually muddy sequences that undermine the clarity of the stakes.
And yet, the film’s flaws feel insignificant when weighed against the emotional terrain it manages to chart. In a universe increasingly built on multiverses, variants, and interdimensional threats, Thunderbolts* refreshingly keeps its focus intimate and low-stakes. These characters aren’t trying to save all of time and space; they’re just trying to survive the wreckage of their own lives. What’s more, the film understands that “surviving” isn’t the same as healing. Each member of the team has been used, abandoned, or broken by institutions that promised purpose. What Thunderbolts* suggests—sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly—is that recovery isn’t about revenge or redemption; it’s about connection. Or, as Yelena puts it with a shrug and a smile, it’s about “figuring out how to live in the hellscape that is existence.”
What sets Thunderbolts* apart is the way it engages, more directly than most MCU entries, with themes of trauma and depression, not as incidental character backstory, but as the very terrain the story walks. These aren’t heroes merely haunted by their pasts; they are people shaped and warped by them, defined by loss, abandonment, and systems that hollowed them out. Yelena’s sardonic humour becomes a mask for a gnawing sense of purposelessness; Bucky’s stoicism thinly conceals the weight of a century of manipulation and guilt; Ghost is still reeling from a body that won’t let her be whole. Even Bob’s transformation into Sentry isn’t framed as a rise to power, but as a terrifying escalation of untreated pain with his mental fragility weaponised by people who see him as nothing but a tool. Schreier doesn’t glamourise this damage, nor does he offer tidy resolutions. Instead, the film finds grace in the struggle itself, in characters who carry their pain forward not as a badge of honour, but as a scar they’re learning, slowly, to live with. It’s one of the rare times a Marvel film has allowed healing to feel messy, nonlinear, and deeply human.
Visually, the film is cleaner and more legible than many of its Phase 4 predecessors. Cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo brings a crisp, tactile sensibility to the action, while allowing the film’s quieter scenes to breathe with natural light and expressive framing. There’s a particularly evocative sequence in an abandoned Avengers Tower where the architecture seems to swallow the characters whole; a lovely visual metaphor for people lost in the legacy of bigger heroes. Composer Son Lux’s score leans heavily on strings and low brass, evoking both melancholy and menace in equal measure. It’s a subtle but effective counterpoint to the film’s emotional through-line: strength doesn’t always shout; sometimes, it just trembles and keeps going anyway.
More than anything, Thunderbolts* succeeds because it refuses to sand down the rough edges of its characters. These aren’t clean-cut heroes or winking antiheroes; they’re people stuck in loops of violence, ego, and shame. But they’re also funny, sharp, and sometimes startlingly tender. That Marvel allowed Schreier and his cast to play in this messier sandbox feels like a small creative victory, and one that pays off far more often than not. If this is what the future of the MCU looks like – smaller, weirder, more emotionally scrappy – then maybe there’s still something left to fight for in this franchise after all.
Even the film’s title, Thunderbolts* (with that cheeky asterisk), seems to wink at its own underdog status. These aren’t the A-team. They’re the haunted, the discarded, the almosts and never-weres. But by the time the credits roll (and one absolute kicker of a post-credits scene), they’ve earned their seat at the table. Not because they’re the strongest, but because they’re still here. Still trying. Still standing. And in a cinematic universe that often prioritises spectacle over soul, that feels like a quietly radical thing. This is one of the best MCU films of recent times and the perfect way to correct the course ahead of some huge titles to come.
Distributor: Disney
Cast: Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, Olga Kurylenko, Lewis Pullman, Geraldine Viswanathan, Chris Bauer, Wendell Pierce, David Harbour, Hannah John-Kamen, Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Director: Jake Schreier
Producer: Kevin Feige
Screenplay: Eric Pearson, Joanna Calo
Cinematography: Andrew Droz Palermo
Production Design: Grace Yun
Costume Design: Sanja Milkovic Hays
Editors: Angela M. Catanzaro, Harry Yoon
Music: Son Lux
Running Time: 126 minutes
Release Date: 1st May 2025 (Australia)