Thunderbolts* (2025)

PG=13 for slightly slightly SLIGHTLY more questionable content than other MCU superhero films.  It's kind of the bargain that you make agreeing to make a movie about the former villains becoming heroes.  You have to deal with a lot of that darkness.  There's more swearing, especially forms of taking the Lord's name in vain.  There's a ton of violence and references to even more violence, like John Walker's murdering an innocent man on camera.  Death abounds.  There's talk about meth and there's a scene of domestic abuse.  There are also loose suicidal references in the film as well.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR: Jake Schreier

No, I didn't know I'd be able to watch this one during one of the opening showtimes.  I was thinking that today was going to be a pretty mellow day.  But here I am, writing about a movie that's opening up today.  That's a good feeling.  I hate letting Marvel movies rest in theaters before going to see them.  In a perfect world, I'd still be fighting the spoiler mill.  I'm a little worried that Thunderbolts* is not going to get the traction that it deserves because it's a bit chic to skip Marvel movies now.  And I'm not going to say that "Marvel is back!" for two reasons.  1) I don't think that Marvel ever left.   It's a problem with audiences, not Marvel.  2) People will jump ship given one misstep, so this is no guarantee of quality over time.   But that being said, Thunderbolts* really works.

I hate making spoiler warnings.  I can't even guarantee that I'm going to talk about spoilers, but there are lots of things that can be spoiled pretty heavily, so I just want to give myself freedom to talk about whatever.  As much as this is a Battle for New York, immediately and intentionally paralleling the first Avengers movie, the story is surprisingly small and intimate.  I never want to write the phrase "Joss Whedon was right" after how much I invested in that man and then he ends up being a monster, but his feelings on smaller Marvel movies is pretty darned smart.  Marvel has always been pretty darned good on character driven narratives.  But I don't think that they've done a better job with their focus on character than in Thunderbolts*.  And, yes, I'm going to write the asterisk every time because the movie completely justifies that asterisk.  

Honestly, everyone gets their time in the sun.  And, thus, I get to the first major spoiler of the movie.  Boy-oh-boy, they kill off Taskmaster unceremoniously.  Putting her on all of the posters?  She gets pretty early billing?  Like, she never actually becomes a member of the Thunderbolts.  She's borderline an NPC in the movie.  She gets one line without a mask and then shot in the head.  So Taskmaster doesn't really align with the character stuff.  But what that does is create a smaller team where everyone kind of has their moment.  I mean, it doesn't seem to shock anyone to think that Yelena is the protagonist of the movie.  Gosh darn it, I love Florence Pugh.  Is it the script that makes Yelena great or is it Florence Pugh?  I honestly believe that Thunderbolts* is the perfect marriage between actor and content.  

I know a lot of people didn't care for Black Widow.  I say those people are wrong, but I also know that I'm in the minority for loving these movies.  Anyway, I kind of have to disparage Black Widow a bit to make a point.  But understand that I think Black Widow is exactly what it should have been.  My bigger argument is that Thunderbolts* is about a character growing.  Black Widow does a lot of heavy lifting.  I think the reason that Black Widow exists as a movie is to give Scarlet Johansson her own superhero movie as a farewell to a long-running character coupled with the need to fill the hole that Johansson's departure from the MCU would leave.  When I found out that it was Florence Pugh, I was thrilled.  She might be my favorite actress working.  But if Yelena is a character based in trauma, it took something that is almost a bit too tangible to base that trauma in.  I'm not saying that's a bad thing.  You are introducing a character with whom we have no relationship and you know that her character is motivated by trauma?  It has to be something that provides origin context.  For Black Widow, it was the violence and abuse inflicted by the Red Room coupled with Yelena's desperation for family. 

Now, none of those trauma's disappear in Thunderbolts*.  But time has passed for Yelena.  While she is still pushed by an attempt to make sense of her trauma, it's not she has been stagnant.  While she still deals with the loss of Natasha and the disappointment of the Red Guardian as a father figure, she now faces a more existential dread.  And THAT is what makes Thunderbolts* far more fascinating.  Thunderbolts* is about the darkness that can't quite be defined.  I mean, that seems like a cop-out.  But visually, Schreier makes that darkness work.  Yeah, we've seen symbolic representations of psyches before.  It's not like he's exactly breaking new ground with every shot.  Instead, I think it more about how he's a much more patient storyteller than any Marvel director has been so far.  He doesn't just spoonfeed those moments inside the Void as something revelatory.  Instead, he has conversations between characters.  The first act of the film is such a mundane idea.  The heroes are stuck inside a bunker after surviving a death trap.  Something that I've never thought about when it comes to death traps is the notion that they shouldn't be easy to leave.  Valentina made this place to be a place that incinerated anything that walked into it.  Why would she make that place easy to leave?  In her mind, there would be no one leaving.  There shouldn't be easily marked exits.  There shouldn't be a way to just walk out of the building.  So spending an entire act just trying to find an out from an already sprung death trap really works as a template for people to have earnest conversations.  

I love how much the MCU has grown as well.  Phase I had a good idea that had a fundamental flaw:  the villain should be a dark version of the hero.  Iron Man had Iron Monger and Whiplash.  Hulk had Abomination.  Thor had Loki.  It made sense.  The problem was that it also got repetitive.  We had people on similar power scales.  The characters tended to be a bit too arch to get the point across that while they were similar people, there was something wrong with the bad guy.  But Bob and the Thunderbolts (especially Yelena) are foils for each other while not being insanely over-the-top.  Yelena and Bob both deal with trauma and finding one's place in the world in real, but different ways.  Yelena's only motivation is the purpose placed upon her as a weapon.  She isn't a person. She's never allowed to be alone with her own thoughts.  She isn't allowed to make decisions by herself.  Her antithesis, Bob, has the opposite problem.  He's only left alone by himself.  He completely lacks any kind of purpose.  When he's offered purpose, it's coupled with unimaginable power.  It's a beautiful dichotomy because they are jealous of each other in ways that they can't imagine.  Yet, they also have the same result, despite having that Gift of the Magi tragedy to each other.  Listen, I'm going right for the heart of this.  This is about untreated mental health issues and they're both treating their trauma in ways that keep spiraling themselves down these holes.

And, yet, the movie is about non-traditional friendships.  These guys all hate each other. With these characters, they have done awful things.  Yet, they all come across --with varying degrees of success --as at least somewhat sympathetic.  I don't think the movie is advocating for toxic people to find each other. Instead, each member of the Thunderbolts at least wants to be something better than what they were before.  Sure, John Walker is probably the most antagonistic among the group.  I get that.  He went from being a decorated soldier and Captain America to the citation for the dangers of even having a Captain America.  But the second that he stops being a turd for two seconds, he actually becomes a mildly likable character.  These are all people dealing with crap that can be fixed with a reasonable dose of therapy and the only real help that they are getting is this accidental group therapy that they call a superhero team.  And the fact that de Fontaine is their Nick Fury is incredibly telling because no one is actually concerned with the mental well-being of these people shy of Bucky.

The sheer brilliance of having Bucky as a de facto team leader (despite Yelena being the protagonist) is fantastic.  We're a lot of movies into the MCU at this point and there's a lot of history to remember about how some of these characters got to this moment in the story.  But having Bucky as someone who has gone through the trials that these characters have gone through is so smart.  I like the fact that Bucky wants nothing to do with these guys, mostly because they are so rag-tag and morally dubious. But I also adore that he can't help but see that the road to recovery is about accepting help and that's his role now.  He's so close to legitimacy as a freshman senator that it would be tempting to watch these morons flounder.  But there is that greater cause to good that Bucky can't help but fill in for that makes the story great.

Honestly, this movie hits on every level. I'm sorry that I didn't talk about Ghost.  I would have loved her to get a little bit more screen time.  I think that her character seems the most well-adjusted by the beginning of this movie.  Clearly, stuff has gone down between the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp and this movie that we haven't gotten too much insight into. But the movie is good.  It doesn't have a villain problem.  If anything, The Void is one of the best villains we've gotten.  There were honest questions on how anyone was going to do anything about this villain and I applaud how the movie handled it.  The Sentry and the Void were always an interesting experiment in the comics and I am amazed that the movie made these characters work as well as they did in the movie, even if it meant changing some fundamentals about the character.  Still, the film is top tier Marvel and I can't wait to watch it again.