Thunderbolts review: Marvel movie deftly balances action spectacle with emotional honesty

It would be tempting to write off Thunderbolts as a B-list Avengers made up of anti-heroes and former villains. Its underdog status is its superpower.

Thunderbolts is a taut thriller sprinkled with wry humour and packs grounded emotional resonance. The latter is a surprise for a film that’s sold as a romp, which it still is, but it is as focused on its characters as it is on explosions.

That’s not necessarily new for Marvel, but it is its first film since late-2022 where the balance has actually worked. There is a depth to Thunderbolts that has been lacking in the studio’s recent cinematic output.

What you get is a movie that is engaging and entertaining, and is genuinely curious about the mental toll of death and destruction on operatives who are neither clear-cut heroes nor villains. This movie exists in the grey.

It’s been packaged as an ensemble film but it’s really Florence Pugh’s movie. She is, undeniably the lead, which is smart because Pugh has impressed in every role since her break-out in the small 2016 British drama Lady Macbeth.

Pugh can tap into something raw and convey the complexities of human emotions and she takes this role as seriously as anything else.

Pugh’s Yelena Belova is a Black Widow, trained in covert ops and as a deadly assassin. Even if you haven’t seen the character’s two previous appearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thunderbolts gives you an immediate sense of who she is – effective, dangerous and depressed.

She has killed and has rarely asked questions, a weapon for someone else’s agenda. The body count haunts her and Yelena is seeking a different purpose even if she doesn’t wholly believe herself capable of being anyone other than who she has been.

Her latest employer is Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), the head of the CIA who is threatened with impeachment by a congressional committee who is trying to prove all her shady dealings.

Valentina is cleaning house, and that includes her band of assassins – John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko). They’re all naturally loners so when they’re pushed to collaborate for their survival, it’s a big ask.

That L word is key to Thunderbolts, a team-up movie which also includes Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes and David Harbour’s Red Guardian.

Loner doesn’t always equate to lonely but in the case of these anti-heroes, that’s what they are. Their disconnection, isolation and profession has hardened them on the outside, using snark and barbs as a cover for the pain and regret they feel.

Thunderbolts is like a two-hour therapy session for not-quite-superheroes. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean everyone is sitting around talking all the time. Plenty of punches are still being thrown and helicopters will fall out of the sky.

But it does involve characters working through some of their long-held trauma when they meet the mysterious Bob (Lewis Pullman), a seemingly unimpressionistic, amnesiac young man who has been experimented on. He has the ability to take people back to their darkest moments.

Thunderbolts greatly benefited from its filmmaking team such as director Jake Schreier and two of its three screenwriters, Lee Sung Jin and Joanna Calo, who all worked together on Beef, a spiky miniseries that played with similar thematic elements.

Having already mastered that juggle between spectacle and emotional honesty, that team infused this Marvel movie with a level of storytelling sophistication and incisiveness.

Maybe the superhero genre can still surprise us.

Rating: 3.5/5

Thunderbolts is in cinemas on Thursday, May 1