Thunderbolts* 2025 review: A psychological view of superheroes

Some will be disappointed by Thunderbolts, which seems to have embraced comedy as a key element of its narrative. Others will be pleased with the sheer amount of comedy, which will remind them of films like Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor. Still others will see the Marvel Cinematic Universe as dying. It seems we are still in an era of crisis and trouble. It is impossible to say that current Marvel films are treated like previous Marvel films, which theoretically ended for some audiences with Endgame. Perhaps the only one, such as Spider-Man: No Way Home, has not been repeated in post-Endgame Marvel films.

In Thunderbolt, it revolves around failure, depression, and loneliness. We see reflections in the characters: Yelena, Walker, Red Guardian, and, of course, Bob as Sentry. Screenplayer Eric Pearson, who is an old writer in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, wrote Thor: Ragnarok, Black Widow, and most recently Thunderbolts. He also wrote Fantastic Four: First Step, which will be released next month. Joanna Calo, a new writer in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, seems to think the writers created one character and distributed it among several characters, but with different dimensions. Yelena suffers from emptiness, depression, and loneliness, and the same is true with Bob and Walker, who suffers from difficult family issues, as well as with the rest of the team members because they are ultimately wanted and do dirty work, and this will certainly affect their lifestyle. Bucky the Winter Soldier, now a congressman work with Congressman Gary, is primarily involved in tracking down de Fontaine's corruption. Gary hopes to remove her from the position of CIA Director after rumours surfaced about a secret project called Sentry, which contained de Fontaine's secrets. One of the secrets of this project was to create a superhuman who would serve de Fontaine's interests, known as Sentry, or Bob. Fontaine believed the project was a failure and that Bob, the volunteer, had died. 

Here we come to the centre of the film, Sentry, who was a volunteer and suffered from addiction, severe depression, and a bad family history. Bob is constantly tense, and you can see this expression in his body and speech. He possesses superpowers such as flight and the power to spread black voids, as well as a strange power that targets bad memories and makes you live in them, similar to the power of Scarlet Witch in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Robert Reynolds gave a good and impressive performance, but the problem is that he was always stereotypical throughout the film, and his performance was not developed. As for Yelena Belova, Florence Pugh played the usual sarcastic character, confident in her strength and intelligence, with her English pronunciation in the Russian way, just like Red Guardian, but this time with a psychological and dark side, which is depression. However, I really didn't like this character because I find her very annoying. This doesn't mean that she was a poorly written character, but I mean my personal taste here. 

I expected that Red Guardian, played by David Harbour, would be the comedy centre of the movie, but in reality, he wasn't. As I said, the movie is basically a comedy, and despite this, if you go to Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb, you won't see that the movie is a comedy, as all the characters in the movie are always telling jokes, whether they are funny or disappointing. And certainly the comparison with the Suicide Squad movie will be present, because the Suicide Squad comics were written a decade before the Thunderbolts comics, and even the Suicide Squad movie was released a decade before Thunderbolts as well, but there are big differences in classification. 

The Thunderbolts movie ultimately does not come close in the cruelty and boldness of the scenes to James Gunn’s Suicide Squad, but the cutting and pasting is definitely present in Thunderbolts. I want to say that director Jake Schreier directed the movie by drawing inspiration from many previous works, but I think that his use of the idea of mental illness in narrating the events is a very smart idea and gave weight and other dimensions to the movie. Surprisingly, the visual effects of the movie were wonderful. I expected the effects to be average, but the effects were strong, especially in the Sentry scenes.

7/10