‘Thunderbolts’ Is the Best Marvel Adventure in Years

Thunderbolts, about a group of MCU rejects who band together after CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) tries to erase them and their covert program, is both a return to form for Marvel and something a little different. While there’s plenty of franchise building going on, Thunderbolts — the title of which bears an asterisk — is pleasantly stand-alone, and its spurts of spectacle more deftly proceed out of a tenderly told story.

If there’s an influence on Thunderbolts, it’s less A24 than James Gunn. It borrows a little of the misfit irreverence of Guardians of the Galaxy and The Suicide Squad. But Schreier’s film is leaner and less antic than those movies, and it serves as an IMAX-sized platform for the increasingly obvious movie-star talents of Florence Pugh.

In the opening moments of Thunderbolts, Pugh’s Yelena Belova, a veteran of the Soviet assassin Black Widow program, melancholily stands atop a skyscraper. “There’s something wrong with me,” she says. “An emptiness.” She drops, a parachute opens, and her narration continues. “Or maybe I’m just bored.”

It’s a telling opening for a film that wrestles sometimes earnestly, sometimes a little glibly, with malaise and depression. Yelena is searching for meaning in her life, dragged down by guilt and shame from her past, a pain that even her relentlessly chipper father Alexei, the self-proclaimed Red Guardian (David Harbour, magnificent), can’t quell. When Yelena, on a mission, brutalizes a hallway full of armed guards — a shot that, as a critic, I am contractually obligated to note is styled after the famous one from Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy — Schreier films it from overhead in a shadowy ballet.

Shadows and death drape Thunderbolts. When Yelena is dispatched on what she says will be her last job, she’s surprised to encounter others like her — including the disgraced John Walker (Wyatt Russell) and the fight-mimicking Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) — sent to the same location. After some initial tussling, they realize they — like the protagonists of Toy Story 3 — are standing inside of an incinerator. Adding to the confusion of their predicament is a guy with no apparent powers who simply introduces himself as “Bob” (Lewis Pullman, bringing a sensitivity rarely found in these movies).

They aren’t quite a bizarro Avengers, but they — including Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes, who joins later — are all the products of dubious government programs that instill less patriotism than their more plainly heroic counterparts. As a group, they’re plagued by doubt and uncertainty, and they’re more inclined to bicker than give rousing speeches. And whenever anyone brushes too closely with Bob, they drift back into the darkest chapters of their own pasts that pull them like a deadweight toward suicidal thoughts.

Who, exactly, Bob turns out to be furthers this theme in Thunderbolts, which never feels like it’s lurching from one action set piece to another. That the final act of the movie is essentially set in a headspace, rather than above a threatened metropolis, is a testament to the interiority (not a word that often comes up in Marvel movies) of Thunderbolts, a film that finds vivid comic-book imagery to render authentic real-life emotions.

That’s always been the promise of a good comic book, but it’s fair to say that the Marvel movies have recently found that tone elusive. When Louis-Dreyfus, looking just as at home in Washington, D.C., as she was in Veep, as De Fontaine declares, “The Avengers are not walking through that door,” it’s an acknowledgment — like then-Celtics coach Rick Pitino once vowed of Larry Bird — that Thunderbolts is here to make the most of what it’s got. Of course, that there are, in fact, more Avengers films on the way slightly diminishes the sentiment.

But they won’t be missed in Thunderbolts. All the assembled parts here, including an especially high-quality cast (even Wendell Pierce!) work together seamlessly in a way that Marvel hasn’t in some time. Most of all, Pugh commands every bit of the movie. It’s less a revelation than a big-budget confirmation of the screen power of an actor who also has gone from A24 (Midsommar) to Marvel stardom with ease.

‘Thunderbolts’ is out nationwide on May 2, 2025.