Thunderbolts (2025) review

 
    THUNDERBOLTS (2025) is a movie that I was looking forward to a lot more than a lot of other Marvel Cinematic Universe fans. I enjoyed the original Thunderbolts comics with Baron Zemo, Hawkeye, Songbird, Mach IV, Moonstone, and others. I also really enjoyed the Black Widow movie that was an underrated gem of the “original” Avengers era. I also am one of the people who really does love goofy antiheroes doing goofy superhero-adjacent stuff as anyone who has read my Supervillainy Saga books will know.

    I’m even fond of the Sentry, a C-list character that has a very complicated history but has been involved in several fantastic stories. A part of me was also fully prepared to hate this movie because a lot of the praise coming back mentioned things like the handling of mental health and illness. Without getting into any specific diagnoses, I am neuroatypical and my family has so many mental conditions in our history that we might as well be H.P. Lovecraft protagonists, I also was one of the people who fully hates the idea of the Sentry being the poster boy for the mentally ill in Marvel as I’d much rather Bruce Banner (a hero) be the guy over a guy I associate as a cautionary tale of Superman gone wrong. I like the Sentry but I don’t want him to be a functioning hero but a tragedy, if that makes sense.

    So was it good? Was it, as Cyndi Lauper would say, “good enough”? Or was it terrible? Are we grading on the curve enough that I was okay with Captain America: Brave New World? Well, the answer is it’s closer to the “good enough” versus the good. It’s good-ish. It’s better than the vast majority of the Disney Marvel mill’s products and has some genuine pathos, which I legitimately thought was absent after Thanos sacrificed Gamora. It has a couple of actual things to say but being deeper than a kiddie pool doesn’t mean it gets deeper than the shallow end of the pool. Solid B+ movie that I will probably watch again with my niece when it comes out on streaming.

    The movie is fairly straightforward even if there’s a few twists and turns. You’ll be completely spoiled if you watch most of the trailers. A bunch of characters from Black Widow, Ant-Man, and Falcon and the Winter Soldier are being used by Valentina de Fontaine (Julia Louis Dreyfus) to do dirty ops for the CIA. Unfortunately, like many spymasters, she’s actually up to her neck in the Military Industrial Complex and we get the first piece of unbelievable fantasy that someone wants to actually hold her account for human rights violations. Highlighting she’s complete scum, she murders almost all of her scientists and researchers in her private supersoldier program before trying to have the assassins killed.

    Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) is more or less the star of the film and feeling deep depression over all the people she murders for the government black ops group. The movie sort of skates past how many people she’s murdering on behalf of her evil CIA handler because she feels bad about it. This part I didn’t hate because, obviously, Yelena is not going to have a well-developed moral compass with being a child assassin. Still, unlike Natasha, Yelena never really gets herself out of the shady work she hates.

    Things go to hell for her and everyone else once they realize that they’ve become loose ends and very reluctantly team up to survive. This group including John Walker AKA US Agent (Wyatt Russell), Ava Star AKA Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and Bob (Lewis Pullman) who seems to be an utterly normal person caught in a bad situation. The Red Guardian (David Harbour) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) end up joining their ad hoc group as well. Fans of Taskmaster and hoping for a Bond girl repeat performance by Olga Kurylenko will be disappointed. Action scenes happen, character arcs occur, friendships are formed, the power of family prevails, heroic sacrifices are made, and so on.

    The much praised handling of mental illness wasn’t a disaster like I was expecting but it’s not exactly great either. Mentally ill people are still people and not violent psychopaths (unless they get infused with powers from demon dimensions). It turns out what most of them need are hugs and not beating them up with superpowers. If you think that’s a spoiler, you will realize this is not the case within a few minutes of Bob’s introduction. It comes as a bit ridiculous after we had the same plot beat in Brave New World. The comedy is also far more prevalent and less cringe than I expected. A running gag is that the Thunderbolts are named after Yelena’s childhood soccer team that sucked but I actually found that kind of touching. Certainly, it’s better than trying to pass these guys off as the next A-Team.

    I mentioned that Disney screwed up by making some of their ideas into TV shows rather than movies with Kenobi, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Hawkeye, and Ms. Marvel all being things that probably would have benefited from being trimmed to 2 or 2 and a 1/2 hours. This is the opposite where just too much happens that doesn’t get developed. A lot more time could have been devoted to the politics behind the scenes, Sentry’s slow descent into megalomania, and all of the characters’ individual traumas that we’re les shown than told. A seven to eight hour miniseries would have been meatier I think but I’m never not entertained either. Better to be all the good(ish) parts and underdeveloped than a slog.

    Watch it.

    But don’t expect to be blown away.