36 movies into a franchise seems a bit much, right? For about 2/3 of its run, the Marvel Studios machine has been coasting on success after success, mildly switching tones and genres, but rarely straying from the same gloss and shine storytelling it began with. The last few years post-Avengers: Endgame being one of the biggest movies in film history have been a trying time. After delivering a grand-slam finale with little direction of where else to go, audiences begin to move on. We saw just this year the absolute slop-job of Captain America: Brave New World, a movie that felt like actors being dangled like marionette puppets against a green screen backdrop. Even their television series (which have undoubtedly added to the fatigue) have suffered with dwindling ratings. Thunderbolts* is a film that would have had nothing to lose in a healthier timeline and the free-spirited direction Jake Schreier shows exactly that.

That isn’t to say its bold swing is enough to make it a top-tier home-run. Thunderbolts* is saddled with some spotty issues right off the bat. For one, it’s grabbing relatively less popular characters from less popular movies and series and hoping to God that you’ve done your homework. Certain characters get little work with here because of the assumption you already understand who they are. Certain plot threads hope you care more than you might have going in. It also seems to be aware of that, working desperately hard to rework the interest in characters such as Julia Louis Dreyfus’ Valentina DeFontaine with a prime villain role, the anti-Nick Fury, who in the past few appearances has stuck out like a sore thumb, unable to blend with the projects they’ve forced her into. Dreyfus is totally locked in, injecting a little spice into a mostly serious antagonist though with less cartoonish vamping than we’d seen prior. DeFontaine’s goals are obvious: eliminate the anti-heroes that work for her by making them kill each other so she can cover her legal tracks. As the “Viola Davis” of this universe, she is responsible for kick-starting the type of plot we have already seen in the DCU’s Suicide Squad films. Once again, Schreier seems aware of that.

Acclaimed for his 2023’s Netflix limited series Beef, Schreier and his team of writers were assigned a superhero team-up film and they deliver just that, but thankfully, despite the obvious structure, they manage to carve out large chunks devoted to these main character’s struggles with alcoholism, addiction, and most heavily, morbid depression. Florence Pugh begins the film narrating her emptiness, fulfilling missions given to her by DeFontaine and struggling with the loss of her sister, Scarlett Johannson’s Black Widow and the lack of communication with her surrogate father, Aleksei, AKA The Red Guardian (David Harbour). Pugh is given most of the film’s attention and rightfully so. Captivating to watch at all times, and a skilled emotional performer, Pugh feels like this generation’s Kate Winslet, able to play exceptionally tough, wise, damaged, and regal, often in the same scene. She even gets to showcase some incredible stuntwork, including opening the film with a very-real jump off of the Merdeka in Malaysia. Harbour is the film’s main source of comedy, though his emotional beats manage to still feel genuine and tender. Returning from the Disney+ series, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, is Wyatt Russell’s John Walker, struggling with feeling bitter after separating from his wife and losing custody of his child after the self-inflicted traumatic effects of that series. Russell is incredibly good here, though his character feels a bit slighted in terms of genuine growth, overshadowed by Pugh, Harbour, Dreyfuss, and new to the franchise Lewis Pullman as Bob.

Bob is the the mystery character at the center of the plot, an outsider who doesn’t quite belong with this team, but winds up in the middle of the action almost immediately. But Bob does indeed have a superhuman gift, or curse, and Pullman balances impressively the fish-out-of-water comedy with the frightening lack of control over his nightmarish abilities. Sebastian Stan assists with his Marvel-veteran support as Bucky Barnes, who gets a few standout moments, but mostly assists in the background to allow the spotlight on Pugh. Hannah John-Kamen also returns from Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) as Ghost and Olga Kurylenko returns from Black Widow (2021) as Taskmaster, though neither get much of anything to do, one in particular… the less said the better.

While the superhero tropes are there right in the plot, the film is thankfully mostly devoted to the back-and-forth conversations between its combative leads, cracking open their shells and dealing with the worst aspects of themselves and the script does not let them all off easy. Their personal issues are not totally fixed by the end credits, which feels beautifully refreshing. The finale, set up to be the same type of CGI battle we’ve been pummeled with in every prior film even side-steps that with a more innovative battle of the psychosis, leading to some impressively staged sequences involving scenery-hopping and emotional crisis reminiscent to Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), even sharing the same composers of that film, Son Lux, who provide a propulsive, riveting sound to even just characters talking in a room. The bones of this film are inescapably Marvel, yes, but heart and muscles thankfully are reaching for something far more interesting than we’ve gotten in the past. Thunderbolts* is a film that has heard your critiques going in and feels insistent that you give it a chance. Whether this is just the start of a promising restart or just a flash in the pan experiment remains to be seen, but either way, it’s a surprisingly good, and deep, time at the movies.