'THUNDERBOLTS*' Asterisks The Future of this Flailing Franchise

There was a time when Marvel movies were actually kind of fun. They weren’t always particularly good, sure, and they leaned heavily on a tried-and-true formula — to the point where you could watch one trailer and predict every algorithmic story beat, crocodile tear moment, and ironic quip that would tumble out over the next two hours. But despite that heavy-handed template, they still managed to be a good time most of the time: actually playing at inspiring heroics rather than just paying lip service to the idea, wringing out a handful of genuine laughs (largely thanks to some truly terrific casting), and occasionally conjuring up an impressive set piece or two. Thunderbolts* doesn’t manage any of that. It’s both humorless and weightless, unable to decide if it wants to be taken seriously or not. The character work is thin, the drama feels half-hearted, and the whole movie hovers awkwardly between grim and goofy without ever committing to either.

Darkness threatens to consume all of Manhattan unless a group of ragtag antiheroes can fend off a bipolar demigod and his bureaucrat handler. But let’s start at the beginning. When her pet project to artificially develop Earth’s new mightiest hero goes sideways, CIA Director Valentina de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) decides to wipe all evidence of her wrongdoing before a congressional committee can toss her in jail. This includes eliminating the handful of mercenaries who have dutifully carried out her dirty work at home and abroad. Among the veteran assassins is Yelena (Florence Pugh), who’s grown weary of her morally dubious assignments. To make it out alive, Valentina’s shadowy mercenaries have to band together, fight their way out of a kill zone, and expose her nefarious plot to create a “superhero” indebted solely to her own political ambitions.

To their credit, previous Marvel team-up movies have generally worked because they took the time to establish who the players were before shoving them into a sandbox together to yap at one another. Thunderbolts doesn’t bother. It drops us in with only a cursory understanding of the team: Yelena (Florence Pugh) is still sad her sister died; her oafish father, Red Guardian (David Harbour), is detached and aimless; newly minted junior senator Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) has decided the best way to save the world is through…politics?; short-lived Captain America replacement John Walker (Wyatt Russell) is desperate to rehab his image; and tech-savvy petty thief Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) seems to just be here for reasons. The film does precious little to deepen our understanding of them or to find any texture in their relationships, leaving both the characters, and their chemistry with one another, feeling especially one-dimensional. Which is saying something in a genre where most characters are already barely more than action figures with catchphrases and signature weapons.

Yelena is the one exception. Florence Pugh does a fine job bringing her character’s inner torment to life, but it leaves her feeling more of a dour than dynamic addition. She’s not much fun — and when your most emotionally grounded character is also your biggest drag on the team’s energy, that’s a problem.

Behind the director’s chair is Jake Schreier, who previously helmed several episodes of Beef, a show bristling with a raw, antagonistic energy that could’ve been a perfect match for a team of self-loathing mercenaries forced to work together. But here, all that bite has been boiled down to PG-13 gruel. You can feel how this movie has been marched through focus group after focus group, each sharp barb dulled, each emotional spike sanded down to a thimble. Nothing pokes through. Nothing’s prickly. Everything’s been aggressively flattened into “safe,” a sanitized echo of what could’ve been. Once again, a director with a bold voice gets swallowed up by the Marvel machine. Sucked into “the Void,” if you will. As a piece of standalone entertainment, Thunderbolts can’t even claim that it stands on its own, existing solely to shuffle the MCU’s shambling corpse another inch forward. Slapping together a few of Marvel’s more street-level mercenary types might’ve worked if they’d gone full Guardians of the Galaxy mode — a movie grounded in real heart that actually took creative swings, like featuring a talking tree and his wisecracking raccoon bestie. Here, the characters are grumpy, abrasive, standoffish, or simply self-serving, and the film’s attempt to suggest that “saving the world starts with making a few friends and maybe getting out of bed” would feel trite and inauthentic if it didn’t also feel so damn lazy.

This is the 36th MCU movie, and somehow it feels less like storytelling and more like watching tired creatives white-knuckle it through their own disinterest, relying on a little quality Zoloft to get them through their own bout of creative depression. Having a bipolar villain battle his way through endless rooms of personal trauma by learning the power of teamwork I guess tries something but it all comes across as rather silly. Ironically, something similar was pulled off with far greater artistry in Across the Spider-Verse, a movie superior to Thunderbolts in every conceivable way. The films attempts to tackle mental health issues meanwhile feel like little more than lip service to a generation obsessed with inauthentic therapy-speak. #Vulnerability without any real substance behind it.

Visually, Thunderbolts is the exact kind of muddy, glossy, flavorless tentpole cinema we’ve all come to expect from mid-stage (end-stage?) Marvel. The fights are instantly forgettable, made worse by the fact that most of the team’s powers boil down to “shoot” or “punch.” The attempts at humor come off as shrieky and try-hard and, at least for this critic’s audience, failed to conjure even a single real communal laugh.

Marvel’s been struggling for a while now to find its footing post-Avengers: Endgame, and Thunderbolts is just another film so busy staring into the rearview mirror that it forgets to build anything meaningful in the road ahead. I can’t say I’m looking forward to whatever the next gen of Avengers turn out to be, but zooming in on this particular crop of characters, I’m not even remotely excited to see them return, either individually or as a team. And that’s the real failure here: if two hours of fisticuffs, banter, and trauma-bonding can’t make you care about these people, what exactly was the point of all the time, money, and energy poured into making it?

More than anything, it’s just exhausting. There’s so much talent involved — good actors, a director who’s proven he can do sharp, human storytelling, a technical machine capable of churning these projects out like clockwork — and watching all that potential get swallowed up by the MCU’s content factory is downright exasperating. These movies aren’t just bad in the traditional sense anymore; they’re the hollowed-out detritus of a crumbling empire, entertainment as empty commerce, and weaponized anticipation. The emperor wears no clothes, and bread and circus just isn’t cutting it anymore.

CONCLUSION: ‘Thunderbolts*’ has all the right ingredients for success, including an interesting assemblage of talent in front of and behind the camera, but it’s squandered on yet another MCU entry that fails to offer any passion or momentum. Superhero team-ups movies are often greater than the sum of its parts, the opposite proves true here.