Thunderbolts* (2025) Review

“You’re not alone”

THE FOLLOWING REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS OF THE DISCUSSED FILM. READERS DISCRETION IS ADVISED.

Coping with personal issues is hard and if a psychiatrist hasn’t helped you out with that, then Marvel’s Thunderbolts* might be your solution.


PLOT


The final film in the MCU’s Phase 5 follows Black Widow assassin Yelena Belova still trying to cope with life as is after losing her foster sister Natasha Romanoff as a result of undoing the Blip. Her decision to cope has mostly been burying herself with work under the hire of CIA director Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who assigns her to cover up evidence of a superhero experiment she was working on dubbed ‘Project Sentry’, by destroying a laboratory. With imminent impeachment on the horizon, Val then assigns Yelena to a covert OXE facility to kill a rogue operative. What the widow doesn’t know it’s a trap for her and other mercenaries to kill each other. The others include: Antonia Dreykov/Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), Ava Starr/Ghost and John Walker/US Agent. Just when Ava kills Taskmaster, a young man named Robert Reynolds awakens from suspended animation who doesn’t remember how he got there. Just when Yelena quickly deduces Val set them all up, they all escape incineration with evidence of her misconduct. However when coming into physical contact with Bob, Yelena & Walker briefly experience visions of their worst memories; Yelena would remember advancing as a widow when getting a classmate named Anya (Alexa Swinton) killed and Walker recalls his own grief losing his glory as a preceding Captain America to the point where his wife and child left him for not moving on. Val finds out from her assistant Mel that they survived, resulting in her sending reinforcements to capture them all. When Bob distracts them to give the others time to escape, he gets shot but survives and ascends into the air before crash landing, confirming he is the sole surviving volunteer of a Project Sentry trial. Witnessing his power firsthand, Val captures him and sends him to the Watchtower in Manhattan, formerly known as Avengers Tower. Yelena, Ava & Walker get picked up by the former’s foster father Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian, who overheard Val’s intentions in the midst of serving her as a freelance chauffeur. They almost get taken down by more of her men until they get intercepted by Congressman James Barnes who was tipped of by Mel of her suspicions toward her boss. He intends to bring them in to testify against Val, but instead agree to infiltrate Watchtower when he discovers about Bob. They end up retreating when Bob defeats him with ease due to all his powers of strength, flight & speed combined. When Bob refuses to execute them due to no longer seeing them as a threat and quickly develops a delusion of god-like superiority, he chooses to turn on her until Mel uses a failsafe kill switch against him. Rather than killing him, this unleashes the dark alter ego, the Void, that only engulfs NY in darkness, trapping every citizen in visions of traumatic memories. Knowing he can only be defeated from within, Yelena enters the Void to confront her past and save Bob. With the help of the other mercs, they help face Reynolds’ past trauma where they see the path of his father’s abuse and drug addiction led to him volunteering for Project Sentry. Bob tries fighting the Void, but the group hug him together to avoid him being consumed of his inner evil. This would help him return light to the city, where every victim is freed and he doesn’t even remember what transpired inside. With the chaos concluded, the group tries apprehending Val until she stages a press conference and take credit of their actions, labeling them as the New Avengers. They all go along with it, but Yelena whispers to her they own her since they can blow the whistle whenever they want. The film ends in a shocking post credit epilogue taking place 14 months after the invasion of the Void: While Alexei relishes off new sponsors as a public superhero and the team settles in the Watchtower, Bob reminds them he can’t unlock his powers of the Sentry unless the Void is free as well. Bucky also shares with Yelena that there is a trademark dispute with Sam Wilson who is assembling his own Avengers team. The film officially concludes when the team sees an extra dimensional spacecraft make its way towards Earth.


THOUGHTS


There are many ideas to explore from Marvel Comics that you wouldn’t expect how will producer Kevin Feige adapt them on the big screen. ‘Thunderbolts’ was originally a government based team where the name means how fast justice can strike like lightning. Instead, we get a ragtag team of rehabilitated figures and the name was from a kids’ soccer team which is hilarious yet creative. The same can be said with how the asterisk in the movie’s title meant the trademark dispute implied in the end with the secret title. Overall, I think director Jake Schreier and writers Eric Pearson & Joanna Calo in making this an adventure that is visceral yet so grounded. The score by Son Lux was so exhilarating and the cinematography by Andrew Droz Palermo made most scenes feel like legit comic book frames like the standoffs between the characters. You know the updated costumes look great on returning characters, but the work from Sanja Milkovic Hays peaks when the focus is on the Sentry. For a character being one of the more recent creations from the brand compared to rest of the ensemble, the details in his suit is surreal in depicting him as what you’d expect from a government made hero, rather than make him a discount Superman. He’s more of a schizophrenic depiction of the character since his darker half dubbed the Void, not to be confused with the TVA’s prison, is haunting to behold as his power to engulf his surroundings in darkness had a terrifying resemblance towards the Hiroshima bombing shadows. And the visual effects done to cover actor Lewis Pullman in black was so intensely made that I truly believed he became this dark half. With that being said, he does a fantastic job in portraying two sides of a coin for a character so damaged he doesn’t know how mentally self heal. You quickly adore Bob because he never wanted to hurt anyone in his life due to the trauma he grew up with and he quickly tries befriending anyone like the team because he’s enamored with how different they are from one another. It was easy for him to fall for Val’s lies because she was the first to make him feel special until he started seeing right through her. That paves the way for his inner darkness to emerge and try consuming him for good along with the whole world. Of course, his chance to maintain the light doesn’t happen had he not others who had their own baggage they were also trying to come to terms with, which brings the story full circle in saying one’s vulnerability can be a true strength. Front and center, Florence Pugh reminds audiences how strong of a lead she is as Yelena, making her return since her debut in the franchise. As expected, moving on from the loss of her sister has not been easy since she never got to say goodbye nor was she ever given a chance to fathom why & how. Adding this with the ruthless assassin training since she was a kid, she doesn’t know how to process her own trauma until she took the first step none of it was her fault. She doesn’t get that chance had she not met Bob and when seeing him the most innocent, she took it upon herself to be the mother that was missing in her life since we don’t know what happened to Mileena. And the nurture she puts towards him is what drives her to lead everyone else to be on the same page. She always felt alone with her grief until being reminded she still had unconventional family with Alexei. David Harbour is oddly more hilarious as Alexei since he still maintains enthusiasm he’s willing to share since he’s still willing to make a difference however. Besides the absence of Mileena, his grief comes from how his country turned his back on him for having a peace of mind. He rightfully is hilarious when seeing embrace the sponsors that come his way upon becoming an avenger because his arc was all about earning glory for his selflessness. Besides that, you can’t blame him for his distance towards Yelena as he said he didn’t think she needed him after all this time. When she expressed her loneliness, he does the right thing standing by her from then on. Had the Void caused permanent damage, there’s no doubt Alexei would’ve been a mess losing her too. Now that they’re together again, there’s no doubt they’ll continue having each others back come Doomsday. Next, it was really good to see Walker again because Wyatt Russell because he’s just a guy who still lacks confidence after losing it all for trying to do the right thing. Like Alexei, he just wants to be appreciated again for his heroism without the criticism for the how, which is fair since he became a veteran before he ever got his own shield. And it goes without saying he got it back when he also helped save Bob. Ghost was a character I wasn’t sure I’d see again since there was no update on her during Endgame or even Quantumania. Nevertheless, I’m glad we had some kind of update on what she’s been up to. Hannah John-Kamen brought a new layer to the role because since the absence of Bill Foster has also led to her being on her own, we get to see her be more decisive than before because while she didn’t hesitate killing Taskmaster, she’s more willing to be reasonable for survival’s sake. Now while I’ve expressed Yelena proves to be a great leader, you can’t forget how natural it’s gotten to be for Bucky. The public may still call him the Winter Soldier for the past he had control of, but continues to act as the White Wolf for the optimism he gained from Steve Rogers and Sebastian Stan does a great job embracing this amount of maturity. He had the right to be strict towards the group because he didn’t know them the way he knew Walker and had to trust his instincts until he got more details. One by one, seeing all these characters unite to save Bob from the Void after confronting their own trauma for the first/second time was beautiful because the action spoke louder that no one is alone when dealing with inner conflict and never will be as long as you let people in. While the Void was a big physical threat, the true villain was someone who definitely doesn’t intend to cope with the past nor let anyone in. Ever since Valentina was first introduced in the MCU, Julia Louis Dreyfus has made it clear she remains to be a manipulative authority figure. The big difference she has from DC’s Amanda Waller is that tries to be sneaky about it until caught, while the latter is upfront in how she treats those she identifies expendable. The surprise though is that her motive comes her own grief of inadvertently having her father killed in the Years of Lead, as we saw when she made contact with Bob, and ever since, she’s seen this vulnerability as nothing more but a weakness. With her refusal to accept it wasn’t her fault, she pushes people away and loses more allies than enemies. Unsurprisingly, her failure in controlling Sentry would only make her desperation to be in control since she takes credit of the New Avengers at the last second. One confession though from anyone in the new team, and it’ll all fall apart. Geraldine Viswanathan showed Mel as the only one willing to catch up to her level of sternness because she wants to make her mark however possible as a public figure, thus willing to pull the trigger on Sentry. But her decision to keep in touch with Buck proves she’s willing to speak up when the line is crossed. Eventually, Val will appreciate her more the longer she sticks around. With this new team representing whatever good she pretends to have left, you can say for sure they’ll do their part confronting the evil that awaits in Doomsday. While this movie keeps the ball rolling in terms of quality storytelling for the franchise, there were still a few moments that confused me way more than the decision to kill off Taskmaster so soon rather than have her share the same arc as the rest of the protagonists. For instance, what happened to the guinea pig Yelena took in the opening? That guinea pig is supposed to foreshadow her saving Bob, so it’s odd not seeing a follow-up on it. Next, did Alexei meet Valentina around the same time she met Yelena? It sure would make sense why she doesn’t remember him the way she remembers his daughter. This is a big stretch here, but how did Bucky get his arm back from the Guardians of the Galaxy, since Nebula took it as a Christmas spirit for Rocket as shown in their holiday special? If he asked for it back or asked Wakanda for a new one, clarification wouldn’t hurt at all for me. Moving on, how come Val’s top soldier Holt (Chris Bauer) not consider going non lethal until she requested it? I mean of all things, you gotta be prepared for an alternative. She also could’ve given Sentry a stronger excuse in killing the team rather than demand him to listen. The last thing that confused me more than Bob losing his blonde dye & suit was how the reporters were actually quiet until the team sees them. They were just absorbed by a manifestation of depression, so they are way too calm to move on from what happened because that looked worse on par to the Blip since there was no guarantee how long they’d be stuck inside the Void. What tripped me out more than her making the mistake of orchestrating the group to all be sent in one spot, was Bob being quiet enough to get out of the truck before shooting a gun in the air. What would also trip me out more of Yelena keeping a paper of Project Sentry on her is that she and Ava somehow didn’t know Walker’s wife left him. Since celebrities like (former) superheroes would be something the media would chew up as shown in the climax, I don’t think anyone would not know if this besides Buck. Then again, how come Walker doesn’t get another shield if he ain’t strong enough to fix the one Sentry? Personally, I’d like to believe Buck could ask on his behalf if they haven’t tried already. Ignore these issues however, then you’ll still enjoy everything this one has going for. In short, Marvel’s Thunderbolts* aka *The New Avengers is another well made entry for the MCU due to being able to take a step back in saying what matters between the chaos we’re used to. If you like this kind of narrative, see this now.