126 min | PG-13 | May 2, 2025 | Walt Disney Pictures
Jake Schreier assembles Marvel’s rejects and outcasts into a team movie that remembers character matters. Florence Pugh and Lewis Pullman anchor the best MCU film in years.
The MCU has been churning out content at a pace that makes genuine character development impossible. Thunderbolts breaks that pattern by doing something radical. It focuses on a small group of damaged people and lets them breathe. Seven antiheroes get manipulated into a mission that forces them to confront who they are and what they’ve become. The film earns its emotional beats instead of demanding you care because of prior franchise investment.
Florence Pugh returns as Yelena Belova and delivers the kind of performance the character always deserved. She finds humor and rage and grief in a woman who was trained to be a weapon and now has to figure out how to be human. Lewis Pullman plays Bob Reynolds, a man with dangerous powers he cannot control, and creates the emotional center of the film. Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, David Harbour, Hannah John-Kamen, and Olga Kurylenko fill out the team with distinct characters instead of interchangeable heroes. Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Valentina Allegra de Fontaine with perfect bureaucratic menace.
Jake Schreier directed Robot & Frank and Paper Towns. He understands small character moments and how to build relationships through dialogue and performance. The script by Eric Pearson, Lee Sung Jin, and Joanna Calo does real work developing the team dynamic. The action sequences are strong but the film prioritizes character over spectacle. The climax earns its stakes through emotional investment rather than world-ending CGI chaos.
This is what Marvel should be making. Films that trust character and story over universe-building and cameos. The asterisk in the title becomes relevant in the final act and the reveal works because the film earned it through two hours of actual storytelling.