Thunderbolts*

Our Review

The B team movie that outperformed its pedigree. Thunderbolts* gathers the franchise’s leftovers: Florence Pugh’s Yelena, Wyatt Russell’s disgraced U.S. Agent, Olga Kurylenko’s Taskmaster, Lewis Pullman’s hollow legged Bob, and Sebastian Stan’s Bucky, now a congressman with a stainless steel arm and no constituency. Julia Louis Dreyfus’s Valentina is the target: a power broker about to be impeached for crimes the group can prove, so she drops them all in a vault to die together.

The film’s engine is depression. Yelena opens the movie numb, doing hits for a boss she hates and describing her life as stuck in a waiting room, and Bob, the super human nobody asked for, becomes the physical embodiment of the theme: a man so empty that a shadow corporation weaponized his ability to be nobody. The third act sends the group into his mind, literal dark rooms built from each member’s worst memory, and stages a rescue by simply standing beside a scared kid. For a franchise of energy beams, that climax is almost radical.

The asterisk in the title is the joke that pays off in the last scene, a rebrand that makes them the New Avengers by decree of a desperate executive. The action is solid work, the vault freefall and the Dubai tower climb especially, though Taskmaster exits early and unceremoniously.

Our score: 7/10. The best argument yet that the series’ future is its weird supporting cast.