Oh No*

*I liked a Marvel movie. What now?

There are spoilers for Thunderbolts* in here, obviously.

It’s difficult to stomach the fact that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been around for more than half my life. Iron Man came out just a couple months before I turned 14. 14 is a dangerous age for a young cinephile. Just about every big movie is being made specifically to grab your attention, and if you’re not careful your taste can get cast in concrete. I saw The Dark Knight four times in theaters that summer. I might as well have been experimenting with heroin.

Thankfully, I survived my brush with disaster, and I’ve been a committed MCU hater for most of the franchise’s existence. I remember being let down by The Avengers, which seemed less epic in scope and scale than I was expecting, but it was Captain America: The Winter Soldier that really turned me off the enterprise. That was a dispiriting year for superhero cinema; everything from Winter Soldier to X-Men: Days of Future Past was being lauded as the genre’s pinnacle, but they were all starting to strike me as more brand management than actual entertainment. By the time Civil War came around, I was a committed contrarian.

In the time since my pan of Avengers: Endgame, most of the rest of society seems to have caught up with me. People are tired of Marvel now for the same reasons I was over a decade ago: the films are tedious branding exercises, they all have the same tired and cringe-inducing sense of humor that undercuts their emotional beats, they look hideously grey and drab….this is all now approaching popular consensus. I should be gloating and told-you-so-ing. Alas, I cannot. What I’m about to say may shock and appall you: I saw Thunderbolts* this weekend, and I thought it was pretty good.

While I don’t make it a habit to roll out to theaters for Marvel movies anymore, I do (to my shame) keep up with them, much in the same way you might “keep up with” a former enemy by checking their social media for any crumbs of schadenfreude. I went to Thunderbolts* as part of a deal with my wife, who likes Florence Pugh and thought that the film might rise to the level of “okay”. Her part of the deal was to see A Minecraft Movie with me, which I was similarly convinced might be a decent time. That bet paid off, so I entered Thunderbolts* with moderate hopes. Perhaps this would be the first MCU movie in a while that wouldn’t make me want to kill myself.

Sadly, it nearly had exactly that effect, for what other response could I have to genuinely enjoying a Marvel movie in 2025? Let alone a Marvel movie about (barf) found family and trauma. Is it a personal failing? After all, Thunderbolts* isn’t that far removed from the MCU formula I’ve found rancid for so long. And yet as I sat in that theater watching scene after scene pass by, I found myself unable to find fault with them. My normal rubric for assessing a Marvel movie felt irrelevant, not because Thunderbolts* was a reinvention, but because it was for once an execution that actually worked.

Thunderbolts* has a cast of characters about as motley as you can imagine. Superhero team-ups have been all the rage for a while now (last year’s Deadpool and Wolverine had the titular duo form a team of castoffs from 20th Century Fox Marvel films) but this crew seems egregiously smashed together. We’ve got three characters from Black Widow (one of whom is killed off in the first ten minutes), a pandemic-era entry that showed the first cracks in the franchise facade, one character from derided streaming series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the villain from small-time sub-franchise sequel Ant-Man and the Wasp, and itinerant sidekick Bucky Barnes. Deadpool and Wolverine put together ostensibly forgotten Fox characters as a joke, but they couldn’t help themselves from grabbing the actually beloved ones for their smug cameo-fest. This group, by contrast, is really truly pathetic. It’s the MCU’s table scraps, brushed onto the floor for the roaches to clean up. It feels genuinely scrappy in the way the franchise’s early days sometimes did, back when they assembled an Avengers team out of whoever they could get the rights to at the time. You don’t need to have seen Black Widow or Ant-Man and the Wasp or The Falcon and the Winter Soldier to understand the plot of this one. In fact, it’s probably more fun if you haven’t, and you are receiving these characters as rejects so unremarkable that they could easily be entirely new additions whose supposed presence in previous films is an elaborate hoax.

The feisty team of antihero losers is a modern superhero movie mainstay, from Guardians of the Galaxy to Suicide Squad. One reason Thunderbolts* succeeds where those films fail is that while its heroes come across as pathetic, they never come across as a joke. It’s key that their doubts and angst are never presented sarcastically, either from their own mouths or metanarratively (the way that Guardians films would often do the whole “man, these guys suck!” routine). Neither are their individual expressions of self-loathing identical; Yelena’s heavy-lidded malaise is distinct from Ava’s (Hannah John-Kamen) hard-armored self-seriousness, which is distinct from Walker’s (Wyatt Russell) delusions of moral high ground. Their interactions are fun, credit the talented cast for having real chemistry that isn’t reliant on over-scripted banter, but never too fun, contra the mismarketing as a Suicide Squad-esque comedy of terrors. The film treats their personalities and problems with startling sincerity, never cutting the legs out from under emotional moments with humor.

And there’s a serious idea central to the narrative—what if there was a suicidal superhero? The opening scene sees Yelena (Florence Pugh), sister to the late Black Widow, monologue in voice-over about her bleak feelings of emptiness and inescapable misery before she steps off the roof of a skyscraper. The camera follows her plummet for just a beat longer than you’d expect before her parachute deploys. It’s all part of a mission, of course, but the imagery is deliberate. And yes, I’m well aware of how ridiculous this sounds; I might as well be praising Bluey for its depiction of mental health. Consider how low I had set bar for the MCU and you may be able to imagine my surprise at seeing it cleared with with more than minimal elevation. When Yelena breaks down in front of her (adoptive? I don’t really remember this detail) father Alexei (David Harbour) about how bleak and hopeless her life feels, their interaction feels authentic and heartfelt, a tangible emotional beat

The extended opening act sees most of the future teammates sent to a vault full of government secrets, which they realize too late includes them, as they’ve all worked in secret for CIA director Valentina de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss). After they narrowly escape incineration, the structure of any other MCU film would dictate a cut to them climbing out of the rubble and moving on to the next setpiece. Instead, Thunderbolts* spends a surprising amount of time riddling out how exactly they are to escape a secure facility many hundreds of feet underground. None of them can fly (“So what, we all just punch and shoot?” whines Yelena) so the problem of ascending a broken elevator shaft requires some actual thinking, and physical effort, and most importantly time. In my Letterboxd review of Avengers: Endgame, linked above, I noted my frustration with the MCU tendency to skip over so much shoe leather that things felt completely frictionless. I likened it to the way Iron Man used to require a massive rig with a dozen robotic arms to put on and take off his suit, making it feel tactile, but by the time of Endgame his suit was “nanotech” that could instantly appear and disappear with just a thought, not even requiring the manual effort of pressing a button. Thunderbolts*, by contrast, takes seriously the limitations of its heroes. When they finally reach the top of the elevator shaft, after an arduous climb, they find a squad of soldiers waiting for them outside (led by a commander named Holt played by Chris Bauer who keeps amusingly begging Valentina to let him “go lethal”). They can’t just use superpowers to blast their way through, so they need to come up with a further plan involving subterfuge and disguises. At a certain point I found myself thinking “oh my god, this is still going,” and for the first time ever in a Marvel movie, that thought had a positive connotation.

But yes, suicide is the crux of the entire film. The villain, Bob, is a suicidal drug addict and victim of child abuse. When he signed up to take part in a CIA experiment to make an all-powerful ubermensch, he got the powers, but he finds himself unable to use them without awakening The Void, an alternate personality that creates a hungry black mass which instantly devours anything in its path and traps them in a surreal maze of their own traumatic memories. Bob himself is trapped in there as well, too full of shame and self-pity to confront his dark half. There’s a lot about this plotline that I found impressive. Lewis Pullman gives a terrific performance, slowly unfurling the character’s inner pain in a way that feels jarringly grounded for One Of These. His sadsack “I always screw everything up” demeanor is immediately endearing, and it perfectly lays the track for his descent into superpowered self-loathing. When his new teammates chase him into oblivion and forcibly confront his depression with love, well, I don’t know what to tell you. It works. They beat the villain in this movie by giving him a hug and somehow it lands the plane.

I liked the idea of The Sentry, too; the experiments Bob underwent were administered by Valentina de Fontaine in an attempt to make a government-owned-and-operated superhero who perfectly suits the findings of market research. Early on, Yelena finds pages of a humorously corporate pitch for The Sentry, with different designs for hairstyles and logos. Later, when we see Bob in his focus-grouped superhero outfit, it looks perfectly terrible, all ugly yellow-gold stripes and strange synthetic stipling, exactly as you’d expect a superhero to look if they were designed by committee. It’s a joke that goes uncommented on in dialogue, a quality which is one of the movie’s standout strengths compared to its fellows.

Another surprising strength? The film’s look. Most Marvel movies have the same washed-out palette with a slathering of CGI gloop on top. Kevin Feige flaunted the auteur-ish voices helming each project with one hand while enforcing a hideous house style with the other. At first glance, Thunderbolts* looks like just another victim of one man’s poor taste. It has that same blue-grey wash without much contrast. It feels deliberate here, though; these heroes are all supposed to be depressed, remember? When the film looks particularly bland, it feels less like the absence of vision than it does a reminder of how these people see their world, a vast and boring wasteland of repetitious missions with no payoff. And when it wants to, it actually looks quite decent. An early shot-from-above of Yelena taking out some goons who cast long shadows down a hallway is impressive. The film is suffused with practical special effects and sets that feel like real places. The design of The Void is particularly impressive: a pitch-black silhouette against overcast skies, its only defining features two chilling pinprick eyes. The film’s visual style is certifiably thoughtful, a fact underlined by the Russo brothers-directed post-credit scene, where everything looks disgustingly green-screened and everyone seems to have a strange orange glow around them, like one of those “RTX On” memes.

The post-credits scene made me suddenly realize how depressed I will feel to watch the Thunderbolts (sorry, the New Avengers) have to interact with the rest of the MCU in future Avengers movies. In turn, this made me realize that against all odds, I actually felt attached to this group of rejects. Thunderbolts* may have strings connecting it to several MCU projects, but it feels somehow distinct from the rest of the enterprise in ways Marvel has struggled to achieve previously. For all the talk of how Winter Soldier is actually a 70s paranoid thriller and Ant-Man is actually a heist movie and Shang-Chi is actually a kung-fu movie, Thunderbolts* is the first one that actually feels like something that isn’t just another Marvel movie. It’s not the most original thing you’ve ever seen, but there’s something there, a little spark of life and creativity that’s found in just about every aspect of the film’s production. I’m not telling anyone to rush out and see it. It’s not going to convert any MCU haters. It didn’t even convert me; there’s no way that their next projects are going to be at the level of Thunderbolts*, and Thunderbolts* only rises to the level of “pretty good.” Still, I’m a believer in radical honesty, and I felt the real personal failing would be to conceal my appreciation for this film out of shame. The end credits sequence features a parade of hilarious in-universe headlines reacting with shock and derision to the final announcement that the team are “the New Avengers.” I have to side with exactly one such article, which is bizarrely credited to real life New York Times columnist David Brooks. His headline is succinct: “I Like ‘Em”.