Thunderbolts* movie review: A Marvel B-team brings A-grade entertainment

Straits Times

30-04-2025

(From left) David Harbour, Hannah John-Kamen, Wyatt Russell and Florence Pugh in Thunderbolts*. PHOTO: THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY
At The Movies: Weak superheroes make for strong entertainment in Thunderbolts*
Thunderbolts* (PG13)
126 minutes, opens on May 1
★★★★☆
The story: A group of superheroes with spotty records and shady pasts – Yelena Belova/Black Widow (Florence Pugh), Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour), Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and John Walker/US Agent (Wyatt Russell) – reluctantly unite when faced with a threat posed by CIA director and industrialist Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus).
The asterisk in the film's title points to its conditional or provisional nature. Its precise meaning will not be revealed here. Instead, have this takeaway: This is the most emotionally rich Marvel movie to come along in a long time.
A decent film-maker can evoke tears with Tony Stark's death in Avengers: Endgame (2019). But it takes talent to wring pathos from a scene in which two lower-ranked Marvel characters talk about the ways they have been hurt.
The film's easy-going yet deceptively taut storytelling stands in contrast to the grim and less coherent Captain America: Brave New World (2025), the most recent Marvel outing.
As the trailer suggests, Thunderbolts* is a comedy centred on a team of misfits. What is surprising is the number and quality of the jokes, most of which stem from them being painfully aware of their inability to do anything awesome, like fly or shoot webs.
As villainess de Fontaine puts it, these are 'antisocial defectives' with B-grade powers, worsened by the emotional baggage they bring to the job.
Viewers familiar with their backgrounds through their appearances on the Disney+ spin-off shows will enjoy a richer experience, but that foreknowledge is not essential.
Red Guardian, the former Soviet supersoldier, is, aptly , a boisterous bear in human form, trying to bond with wary adoptive daughter, the assassin Yelena (Pugh). Their exchanges crackle with a tense energy.
Unusually for a Marvel ensemble work, the cast is stacked with strong character actors, beginning with Harbour and Louis-Dreyfus, who are ably backed by Russell and Stan.
Russell is striking as the disgraced former Captain America, now a glorified henchman for de Fontaine, played by Louis-Dreyfus in a role that will have fans of her political satire Veep (2012 to 2019) weep with joy.
As de Fontaine, she personifies hypercapitalist America, the beast that swallows superheroes and turns them into products. The veteran actress brings such joie de vivre to the part, it becomes impossible to hate a woman who loves her job so much.
Director Jake Schreier, making his Marvel feature debut, handled the middlebrow dramedies Robot & Frank (2012) and Paper Towns (2015), but it is his television work that best represents his ability to balance pathos, comedy and heartfelt emotion.
He directed episodes of the cruelly underappreciated comedy Lodge 49 (2018 to 2019), which also starred Russell, as well as the first season of the Emmy-winning Netflix satire Beef (2023).
In Beef, the story of a feud taken to monstrous extremes, an ounce of therapy would have prevented a pound of suffering. The same principle applies in this film, except the stakes are much higher.
Hot take: Thunderbolts* delivers rare emotional richness through its B-list heroes, proving that often, stronger superpowers lead to weaker storytelling.
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