Friendship is magic for the MCU’s one-trick ponies.
Thunderbolts* doesn’t so much swing for the fences as claw at the soil, digging deep into the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s emotional rot to unearth something raw, twitching, and quietly furious. Forget The New Avengers, it’s the anti-Avengers, not in the sense of villainy, but in how it treats heroism not as a beacon of hope, but as a lifeline grasped in despair.
Jake Schreier’s debut outing in the MCU walks the uneasy line between redemption arc and psychological collapse, and somehow manages to make both feel honest. He corrals a grab-bag of familiar figures from Marvel’s murkier corners: Yelena Belova, from Black Widow and Hawkeye, now finally given more space to breathe through Florence Pugh’s bruised, magnetic performance. Bucky Barnes staggers on, weary and brittle behind Sebastian Stan’s eyes, the super-soldier still mourning every choice he didn’t get to make. Wyatt Russell’s U.S. Agent snarls his way through the group dynamic like the Captain America also-ran he is, resentment given flesh, while Red Guardian (David Harbour, dialled in and dialled up) lumbers around trying to smother his insecurities with bravado and vodka-fuelled nostalgia. As Yelena herself dryly observes, superhero-wise there are a lot of low cards in that hand – they all just punch and shoot.
If this all sounds a bit grim, that’s because it is. Thunderbolts* is Marvel’s closest brush yet with the language of depression – not as a story beat to overcome, but as a constant adversary. This isn’t a clean-up crew; it’s a support group with tactical gear. Every mission is a metaphor, every fight an act of displacement, and every hollow victory a momentary silence in the storm. Olga Kurylenko’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-her Taskmaster and Hannah John-Kamen’s taciturn Ghost barely speak, but that muteness has meaning: one robbed of agency, the other feeling the accumulating price of fading out of existence with every step forward.
But it’s in Bob the film finds its most eloquent expression. No spoilers here, but Lewis Pullman’s arc is less about corruption than collapse. The MCU finally puts its weight behind a portrayal of mental illness that doesn’t get neatly boxed up by act three. The Void isn’t a villain—it’s a manifestation. Maybe even a diagnosis.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Valentina Allegra de Fontaine keeps the plot moving, cajoling, manipulating and occasionally outright pushing people to where she needs them to be, her cynical bureaucratic menace a reminder that institutions – especially private ones – rarely care about the interior lives of their weapons. She’s Nick Fury without the heart, General Ross without the pretence of patriotism and Louis-Dreyfus infuses the role with just the right amount of sardonic corporate pivotting as the situation spirals out of control.
Tonally, the film jettisons the usual Marvel gloss. There’s no quipping through trauma (Red Guardian aside) or slow-mo power poses here – Schreier’s direction keeps the frame tight, the colours drained and muted, the entire palette weighted with fatigue and disassociation. The world feels leached of hope, every shadow stretching just a little too long, every light dimmed to the edge of flickering out – even before The Void is unleashed on Manhattan. It makes the mid- and end-credits scenes land all the better, when a tentative warmth seeps back into the frame, even if the dialogue maintains its gloom-laden tone. It’s not enough to suggest all is well, but just enough to suggest the possibility of healing. When action does erupt, it’s sudden, jagged, and painful, choreographed like people trying not to fall apart in public.
Continuity-wise, Thunderbolts* is deep-cut central. It ties up threads from Black Widow, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Ant-Man and the Wasp, but never leans on them for crutches. If anything, it treats its characters’ past appearances as trauma rather than lore – what matters is the baggage, not the backstory, exemplified by John Walker’s tortuous journey being summed up in a pithy couple of sentences by Yelena and Ghost.
It’s not perfect, and maybe it’s appropriate for it not to be. The pacing is a little uneven (although its two hour run time rarely drags), and there are moments where the ensemble’s emotional arcs grind the plot into molasses. But that weight feels earned. These aren’t heroes chasing legacy. They’re just trying to cope. Trying to not screw up again. Trying, full stop.
By the time the dust settles, nobody’s saved. Not really. But they’re not entirely lost either. Thunderbolts* argues that maybe that’s enough – that survival is its own kind of defiance and that while friendship isn’t quite magic, it’s enough of a balm to help you keep things together. That learning to fight depression doesn’t mean beating it, but refusing to let it beat you. For the MCU, and superhero cinema in general, that’s something almost radical: a superhero story that dares to say “I’m not okay” and mean it.
