- UK release: May 2025
- Director: Jake Schreier · Writers: Eric Pearson, Joanna Calo
- Studio / distributor: Marvel Studios; Walt Disney Studios
- Genre: Superhero ensemble / psychological action drama · Runtime: 126 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Florence Pugh (Midsommar, Little Women) as Yelena Belova; Sebastian Stan (Captain America: The Winter Soldier) as Bucky Barnes; Wyatt Russell (Overlord) as John Walker; David Harbour (Stranger Things) as Alexei / Red Guardian; Lewis Pullman (Top Gun: Maverick) as Bob
- IMDb: 7.1 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 88% critics / 93% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
The Marvel machine has spent a couple of years now running visibly low on conviction, churning out instalments that arrive pre-shrugged, films nobody quite seems to have wanted to make. So there is a small thrill in finding that *Thunderbolts**, of all things, the one assembled from the bench players and the discards, is the entry that remembers what these films can do when somebody cares about the people in the suits. Jake Schreier, whose best-known feature is the gentle Robot & Frank, is an odd hire for a comic-book ensemble, and that turns out to be the smartest decision Marvel has made in a while.
The setup
The premise is almost a joke at the brand’s own expense. A handful of expendable antiheroes, the people the franchise has left lying around, find themselves lured into a remote facility on what looks like a routine black-bag job and quickly realise they have been gathered there to be quietly erased. Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), a contract killer running on autopilot and not much else, is the reluctant centre of the group, alongside a disgraced super-soldier, a former Captain America who never recovered from being one, an ageing Soviet strongman, and a frightened, oddly gentle young man called Bob whose presence none of them can account for. What begins as a fight to get out of a sealed room turns into something stranger and sadder, a story less about a villain to punch than a darkness to outlast. I will leave Bob’s part in it where the film leaves it.
The cast
Florence Pugh carries this. She has been the most interesting thing in everything Marvel has put her in, and here she finally gets the weight of a lead, playing depression and exhaustion as a flat, deadpan numbness that the film treats with real seriousness rather than as a setup for a quip. Sebastian Stan gives Bucky the watchful stillness of a man who has run out of wars, and David Harbour walks off with every scene he is in as Alexei, the Red Guardian, a washed-up Soviet hero clinging to past glory with a needy, lovable desperation that keeps the film from tipping fully into gloom. Wyatt Russell’s John Walker is all wounded pride and bad decisions, and Lewis Pullman, as Bob, gives the most delicate performance in the film, soft-spoken and unstable in a way that earns the unease around him. The chemistry is bruised and prickly, which is exactly right for a group of people who do not want to be in the same building, let alone the same team.
The craft
Schreier and cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo shoot this on a noticeably more human scale than the house style. There is less of the weightless digital sludge and more grain, more shadow, more rooms that feel like rooms. The action is closer and crunchier, hand-to-hand fights with actual impact rather than armies of pixels colliding in a grey sky, and the film is unafraid to slow right down and sit in a quiet, frightening interior space when the conflict turns inward. Son Lux’s score is uneasy and textured rather than bombastic, and the whole thing is mercifully controlled at just over two hours. It is a Marvel film that trusts silence, which is not a sentence I expected to write.
How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is The Suicide Squad, the other recent ensemble built from disreputable also-rans, and *Thunderbolts** is the warmer, more interior film of the two, less interested in shock than in damage. It shares some DNA with Guardians of the Galaxy in the way found-family banter does the emotional plumbing, but it is markedly less zany, and it owes a real debt to Black Widow for Yelena and Alexei, who were the best part of that uneven film and are given far more room here. Set against the bloated team-up spectacles the franchise usually trades in, this feels almost like a chamber piece, and is better for it.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are unusually warm, parking it around 88%, and the recurring note is relief: the consensus reads as a collective exhale that a Marvel film has bothered to be about something again, with particular praise for Pugh and for the film’s willingness to take mental illness seriously rather than gesture at it. Audiences are warmer still in the low nineties. The dissent, where it exists, is that the franchise scaffolding still clanks into view at the edges and that a film about depression can only push so far inside a 12A blockbuster. Both fair. Neither does much to dent the pleasure of watching a tired machine briefly run well.
Verdict
I came to this expecting another contractual obligation and found a genuinely involving one. It works because it is small: real performances, a clear emotional idea, action you can follow, and a tone that earns its melancholy without drowning in it. It is not reinventing anything, and the franchise plumbing occasionally intrudes, but it is the most rewatchable Marvel film in some time precisely because it is built around people rather than around the next instalment. On the strength of Pugh, Harbour and a director who knows when to stop, this clears the bar comfortably. 8⁄10.
Availability: In UK cinemas now, including IMAX, on general release from 1 May.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the asterisk in the title pays off as a setup for what the team becomes, and the film functions as the launchpad for the next phase of Avengers films rather than a standalone. Its reputation has held as one of the better recent Marvel entries and a high point for Florence Pugh’s Yelena. It is now available on digital and disc, and streams on Disney+ depending on your region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence, threat, language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: Moderate violence, set in a fantastical context, includes shootings, stabbings, crunchy hand-to-hand fighting, stranglings, energy blasts and people turning into shadows as a sinister force obliterates them, The violence features infrequent and minimal bloodshed. A man recalls his childhood and his father’s physical abuse of his mother and himself.
Threat and horror: There is moderate gun and knife threat, as well as people endangered by a fantastical force causing buildings to collapse and cars to come hurtling through the air at them.
Language: There is moderate bad language (‘dick’, ‘prick’, bitch’), as well as milder terms such as ‘shit’, ‘ass’, ‘bloody’, ‘screw’, ‘butt’, ‘damn’, ‘hell’, ‘God’, ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’.
Drugs: A man talks about his history of drug addiction and misuse of ‘meth’, but acknowledges the problems it has created in his life.
Rude humour: Very mild rude humour includes ‘poo’ jokes.
Theme: Mild upsetting scenes are centred on memories of death, mental illness and other trauma in the childhoods of different characters.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
