Marvel films have not been short on ambition in recent years. What they have been short on is the willingness to sit inside their characters’ damage rather than resolving it efficiently. Thunderbolts represents a departure — a film that assembles genuinely broken people and treats their brokenness as the subject rather than an obstacle.
The film inherits its cast from across the MCU’s obscure corners: characters who appeared as antagonists, as damaged secondary figures, as people whose storylines were left structurally unresolved. The conceit — assembled by Val (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) for purposes she is not fully disclosing — gives the film permission to spend its runtime on character rather than plot.
The Pop Score
Rating based on impact and craft.
Florence Pugh’s Yelena as Emotional Center
Pugh has been doing specific work in this role: playing someone who is funny because she is trying very hard not to be sad, and whose humor makes her sadness more visible rather than less. In Thunderbolts, she carries grief from Hawkeye alongside the deeper damage of having been raised as an assassin. She has not processed either. The film offers her not a clean arc but a situation — people damaged in adjacent ways — and watches what she does with proximity to people who understand.
What she does is perform competence as a substitute for vulnerability. She is the most capable person in most rooms she enters, and she uses this to avoid engaging with what she feels. Pugh plays this with precision: emotional avoidance is its own kind of skill, and its performance has tells.
Bob Reynolds and the Problem of Uncontrollable Power
Bob Reynolds (Lewis Pullman) — the Sentry — is the film’s structural gamble. His power is presented not as an asset but as a problem: a being of enormous capability whose psychological instability means that capability cannot be reliably directed. The film uses Bob to ask a question the MCU has avoided: what does an institution do with someone it cannot control? The answer is not reassuring, and the film earns this by establishing who Bob is before using him structurally.
On the Film’s Refusal of Easy Resolution
The characters’ damage does not disappear at the end. Walker (Wyatt Russell) has not become a good person; he has become someone aware of what he is. Yelena has not resolved her grief; she has found people who do not require her to perform a version of herself that excludes it. What they have formed is not a conventional superhero team but an alliance of mutual recognition — defined not by common purpose but by having been on the wrong side of someone else’s story.
Direction and Tone
Jake Schreier directs with a preference for stillness unusual for the genre. The most important scenes are conversations. The action sequences are competent but serve the character work rather than the reverse. The tone manages something genuinely difficult: it finds real humor in its characters without using that humor to defuse the emotional stakes.
Thunderbolts (2025). Director: Jake Schreier. Starring: Florence Pugh, Lewis Pullman, Sebastian Stan. This review reflects the personal opinion of the author.
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