Film Review - Thunderbolts* (2025)

Thunderbolts* is the newest Marvel Studios movie and sees Florence Pugh and David Harbour return from 2021’s Black Widow and this time their joined by Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), John Walker (Wyatt Russell) and Bucky (Sebastian Stan) and this group is brought together by Valentina Allegra Di Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and a mysterious man named Bob (Lewis Pullman)

Thunderbolts* is not a bad movie and certainly a better movie than the previous Marvel movie Captain America Brave New World but the more I’ve thought about it the more I find myself putting it in the same basket as Black Panther 2 and the Marvels in that while I don’t hate it I also don’t think its all that much either especially as my overall fatigue with this franchise has grown more and more over the last few years.

Now that isn’t to say that this movie isn’t without any merit, certainly not as this movie definitely has some good ideas at its core especially around mental health and wanting to be recognised as the hero they were meant to be and the toll of pain and fighting over many years that it takes on some of the characters especially Yelena and Pugh is great in this role but for all of the talk of pain I just kept thinking of “I don’t want my pain taken away I NEED MY PAIN!!!” from Star Trek 5 the Final Frontier and that film was willing for all of its many faults to explore that in a more sincere way.

And the cast is good as well, Pugh as I mentioned above sells her Pain very well as does Harbour who was trumpted so much as the Soviet equivalent of Captain America but was never given the chance to properly prove it (and unfortunately this movie doesn’t really give him that chance either which is a shame), Sebastian Stan is good as well but he can do Bucky well at this point and I enjoyed seeing Hannah John-Kamen again as Ghost and Wyatt Russell was good as well.

As for Julia Louis-Dreyfus I thought she was okay as Valentina but this franchise really needed to make her the new big bad after Thanos in order to make the arc this movie had in mind for her all the more impact to work properly and also at times it feels like she is playing Evil Elaine from Seinfeld and as for Lewis Pullman he was fine but doesn’t do an awful lot save for the third act.

And given the positives here I also had a feeling while watching this movie that I’ve now become so fatigued by this universe and the lack of direction and glut of movie and streaming shows without any real purpose or drive or forward momentum to them that I’ve just become tired of it all now and that feeling has intensified for me as the next movie coming up is Fantastic Four: The First Steps and I can’t help but feel that that movie exists at the expense of losing 20th Century Fox as an independent movie studio as so many die hard Marvel fans essentially didn’t care if Fox was bought by Disney if it meant F4 and the X-Men went into the MCU.

And it is very clear to see that the loss of Fox has left a large hole in the industry post Covid which has struggled to get back to the kind of numbers both box office and attendance wise that it enjoyed before the pandemic and as much as Amazon reviving MGM and streamers like Netflix and Co have tried they just cannot fill that hole left behind by Fox’s absence.

And this isn’t to let Fox off the hook in their treatment of Fantastic Four either as they utterly failed in the mid 2000’s to learn the lessons from the success of X-Men and X-Men 2 those being hiring a strong creative mind to oversee those characters and deliver great films with them in the same way that Bryan Singer (considerable baggage aside) did with his era of X-Men save for Apocalypse in 2016 but these things happen I suppose.

And so that was Thunderbolts* and its an okay film that many Marvel fans will be happy with as it isn’t a dumpster fire but it also can’t escape the fatigue I feel with this series post Infinity War and Endgame, 2 out of 5.