Thunderbolts (2025) Review

Marvel's "we need therapy" movie that keeps insisting a group hug can solve an extinction-level event. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it's a corporate wellness poster with explosions.

We open on Yelena narrating a mission like she's recording an extremely Russian true-crime podcast. It's a deliberate riff on Widow's Civil War prologue, only with a grimmer color grade and the dry, barbed humor Florence Pugh's been perfecting since Black Widow. She has more lived-in personality in five minutes than Natasha got in five films. That's not a knock on Johansson so much as a reminder that Pugh can wring pathos and punchlines out of a raised eyebrow.

Meanwhile Bucky Barnes is… a congressman? Sure. America's elected weirder. He's dourly effective in photo-ops, less so when the plot requires him to slip back into Super Soldier Wrecking Ball mode. Sebastian Stan looks great doing tactical brooding, but the movie keeps toggling him between "cool uncle with knives" and "the responsible adult in a room full of raccoons."

Val (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is getting indicted and treating it like a Capitol Hill roast. Early on she plays standard-issue politician - smiles, platitudes, a fleck of crocodile tear - and then drops the mic: the president went full Red Hulk, so maybe a little light illegal superhuman R&D isn't the moral apocalypse. She's Selina Meyer with a murder budget, and the film knows it; her assistant even does the Veep air quotes for "housewarming."

We detour to a very unemployed Red Guardian (David Harbour), now driving cabs and itching for any scrap of relevance. He's desperate, he's delusional, he's hilarious. Also: how is an actual supersoldier not getting hired to, I don't know, lift oil rigs? The MCU economy remains vibes-based.

Then Val's off-the-books strike team hits a facility, where Taskmaster (still the Black Widow version) pops in long enough to get deleted by Ghost. It's less a fight than a mercy killing for a character the franchise never figured out. Out stumbles Bob - hospital pajamas, thousand-yard stare - insisting he's "fine," which is the biggest red flag in the movie.

Yelena wants to go public; Val nopes that idea from orbit. US Agent objects to being lumped with "cheap mercenaries," and the script promptly turns him into the world's most gullible bulldozer. Wyatt Russell can play brittle menace in his sleep; here he's written like he's been concussed by a patriotic anvil between projects. Character continuity? Never met her.

The deathtrap itself is delightfully dumb-comics: silo floor, no flyers, lots of guns; "we all just punch and shoot," Yelena observes, neatly subtweeting the announcement-era backlash about a Dark Avengers lineup with no Osborn, no Daken, no Venom. Bob has a plan that's 60% bad idea, 40% plot coupon. It sort of works until it doesn't, at which point the movie sort of shrugs.

Val learns Bob survived the "Sentry procedure." Yeah, that Sentry - the golden god with a million exploding suns. Except this one's more Marvelman: heavy on telekinesis, mood swings, and dissociation; light on skyscraper-as-baseball-bat. He can fly. He can tank bullets. He can also faint mid-rampage and face-plant like a beached meteor. The VFX sell the power; the script sells it short.

Bucky shows up in full "I still got it" mode - stuns a squad of US servicemembers, detonates two chase vehicles, then needlessly uses a grappling hook like he's auditioning for Just Cause 5. He captures the Thunderbolts with ropes you could Houdini out of in an Uber. He interrogates, he scowls, he eventually concludes: Val is sending them to die to bury her sins. Correct.

"Righteousness without power is just an opinion," Val purrs, and it's a line cold enough to frost glass. She then unleashes Sentry as her personal angel of PR. He gently no-sells Bucky, rips off the metal arm, and smacks him with it - objectively funny, spiritually redundant after Homecoming already did the "OP hero hand-catches veteran's haymaker" beat. Within minutes, Sentry also announces he won't kill the team because they're not a threat and, uh, why is he listening to Val again? Great question. The movie's answer: remote off-switch. Flip. Thud. Enter: The Void.

The Void looks fantastic - inky cosmos eating the frame, eyes like headlights in a storm - but we get maybe 50 seconds of Sentry being Sentry before we're in Angsty Cloud World. Stakes-wise, Void is… localized. He "voids" small clusters of people at a time. After Chitauri, Ultron, Thanos, and two secret Nazi governments, a floating depression smog feels less apocalyptic and more "somebody open a window."

Yelena wanders into the Void to fish Bob out of his trauma. We cycle memories (hello, child-Widow), we rehash the well-worn "fight yourself, literally" trope, and then we arrive at the film's thesis: you cannot punch depression, but you can hug it. Sentry pummels Sentry until Yelena stops him, shares her own darkness, and we stage a group embrace featuring assassins, war criminals, and at least one man who just detonated a convoy. The sentiment - "you're not alone" - is fine. The execution is clumsy, an after-school special taped over a Michael Bay reel.

Back topside, the Thunderbolts do one clearly heroic thing and get applause like they just saved Midtown from space whales. Val instantly rebrands them as The New Avengers mid–press scrum, sprinting through a canvas tent to plant a flag before anyone can arrest her. The team decides blackmailing Val is better than bagging her. This is the worst idea they have all movie, and that includes "rope handcuffs for supersoldiers."

Performances keep the whole contraption upright. Pugh is aces - acerbic, vulnerable, lethal. Harbour remains the MCU's best sad clown. Julia Louis-Dreyfus spritzes acid over every syllable. Sebastian Stan's action beats slap; his character beats feel throttled. Wyatt Russell deserves a draft of the script where Walker isn't a lobotomized boot. And Lewis Pullman's Bob is compellingly fractured, even when the film reduces his condition to a binary light switch.

Action is solid, practical-leaning, and occasionally inventive; it's also a lot of punch-shoot-bang with minimal superpower variety. Thematically, the movie wants to be about mental health, guilt, and found family. Sometimes it nails that - Yelena oversharing with Bob is painfully honest in a way superhero cinema rarely attempts. Often it doesn't - depression is not a supervillain, and turning it into purple fog you can disperse with empathy and willpower feels reductive.

Comedy lands about 60% of the time. The other 40% is quippy filler or Veep karaoke. Still, I laughed - mostly when Val weaponizes civility, and whenever Yelena verbal-snipes her own teammates into behaving.

Third act? Messy, if not catastrophic. The movie pivots from "suicide mission conspiracy" to "psychic rescue mission" so fast it sprains itself. You can feel the reshoots stitching moral clarity onto studio notes about setting up Phase Whatever. Speaking of: stingers. One is Alexi fishing for recognition in a shop aisle - funny until it's a little ick. The other jokes about who owns "Avengers" branding while quietly confirming the internet crowns Sam as the real Cap. Then a Fantastic Four ship whooshes by so Kevin Feige can sleep at night.

Is it bad? No. Is it good? Often! In a world where we weren't on superhero film number nine hundred and something, this might even feel fresh. As is, Thunderbolts is a sturdily entertaining mid-tier MCU entry with flashes of something braver. It just keeps undercutting itself - by sanding down its nastier characters, soft-pedaling its Big Sad allegory, and letting its smartest person (Yelena) make the dumbest strategic choice (let Selina Meyer run the Avengers).