I didn’t anticipate watching Thunderbolts* (2025), yes the asterisk is supposed to be there, but it was at the public library in the new films section, so I figured “why not?”

It was actually better than I thought, but you have to accept it for what it is. I’ll get to that.

Spoiler Alert: This review is loaded with them, so if you haven’t seen the movie and want to be surprised, stop reading now.

Pet Peeve Alert: The characters of Yelena and Alexei were once part of a spy cell pretending to be a typical American family and as such they spoke perfect English. Why, oh why are they now speaking in heavily accented English just to prove they are Russian? It’s stupid.

Now let’s continue…

Basically this is Marvel’s…I was going to say “B-Team” but they aren’t even that high on the list, well most of them anyway…trying to carve their way into being heroes when most of them at least have histories as villains if not actually still being on that list.

We start out with Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Natasha Romanoff’s (Scarlett Johansson) secret agent sister (see the 2021 film Black Widow) still living the life of an assassin for the CIA killing people and stealing stuff. She’s totally empty and alone and has no purpose in her life, still grieving over Natasha’s death as seen in Avengers: Endgame (2019).

She is working for the CIA’s current director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (played by the totally miscast Julia Louis-Dreyfus) cleaning up her messes in attempts to create metahumans to become her personal hit squads. This is as the “Countess” (well, she was in the comic books) is sitting in front of a Senate committee and staring impeachment in the face.

As an aside, the Director of the CIA isn’t elected but rather appointed. The President could have fired de Fontaine anytime he wanted.

This is the point where freshman Congressman Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) enters, starting as a spectator and then a would be collaborator with Congressman Gary (Wendell Pierce) in trying to get something on de Fontaine. Bucky tries to enlist the aid of de Fontaine’s secretary Mel (Geraldine Viswanathan) who initially rebuffs him.

Meanwhile, Yelena looks up the only person left she feels a connection to, Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour), otherwise known as the Red Guardian. He’s living a mundane life running a small limo service and is also pretty much just existing like Yelena.

Finding no satisfaction from him, Yelena asks de Fontaine for a “public service” assignment once she’s done destroying one last lab and killing one last person.

But it’s a setup. Sure, she gets inside okay but instead of finding her target Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko) the Taskmaster, she’s attacked by John Walker (Wyatt Russell) also called U.S. Agent, basically a dime store Captain America.

Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), the Ghost, also shows up and a big fight ensues. It becomes immediately obvious that they were all sent there to kill each other as they are the evidence of de Fontaine’s misdeeds. Everything is thrown out of kilter when a seemingly harmless and clueless guy named Bob (Lewis Pullman) shows up with absolutely no idea how he got there or what’s happening.

At a party, de Fontaine tells Mel to hit the switch and turn on the incinerator at the lab. It doesn’t matter if Yelena and the others kill each other or not because in two minutes, they’ll all fry anyway.

Taskmaster gets killed and the others, including Bob, try to escape. A sonic trap stops the Ghost from walking through walls, but they find the power source and disable it.

Escaping trap one, they have to find away to climb to the surface without stairs or an elevator. Once de Fontaine finds out the…not a team yet…are still alive, she orders a strike force to go in and finish the job. On the flight out, Mel and de Fontaine find out enough about Bob and the project that created him that they decide to try to take everyone alive.

It doesn’t go so well.

In the middle of all this, we discover that whoever Bob touches is thrown into a memory of their worst shame which for Yelena is being a child being trained by the Red Room and luring another little girl to her death. For Walker, it’s being a crappy Dad and husband and having his family leave him.

Alexei has managed to swing a job as de Fontaine’s limo driver and overhears her sinister plan to kill Yelena and the others (she must be stupid or something to let that happen).

Our team escapes but only after Bob is killed, revives, flies, falls, explodes, and reassembles unconscious.

Somehow Alexei has driven his limo all night from D.C. to Utah (an impossibility in a regular limo) to find and pick up Yelena, Ava, and John.

They are pursued and when Bucky shows up on a motorcycle, he takes out the CIA team and then captures Yelena and the others. Working on information Mel gave him, he plans to turn them in and use them to testify against de Fontaine.

Then Mel calls saying that de Fontaine, who has bought the old Avengers tower and turned it into Watchtower, has revived Bob (Robert Reynolds) and is conning him to use his powers as Sentry, a project that turned him into a god-like figure, to pretty much take over everything.

Bucky switches tactics and, as the audience has been led to expect, forces this group of total losers into an anti-hero team with him in the lead.

Oh, Bob touches de Fontaine and discovers her shame is, as a little girl, putting her Dad in a situation where he’s assassinated while she watches. That doesn’t seem to go anywhere for her, but Bob’s touch does seem to clarify a few things for Walker and especially Yelena.

Arriving in New York, our team of “Thunderbolts,” named for a children’s soccer team Yelena played on when she, Alexei, Natasha, and Melina (Rachel Weisz) were pretending to be an American family but really were Soviet spies, confronts de Fontaine and gets their collective ass handed to them by the now Superman-like Sentry.

They run off in tail-between-their-legs fashion while Sentry asks de Fontaine why he should have to take her orders. Previously, a “kill switch” was developed to take Sentry out if he went rogue. He doesn’t give her a chance to use it but as he’s ready to kill de Fontaine, Mel picks it up and uses it.

It does no good. Actually, it makes things worse by turning Sentry into “the Void,” a negative image counterpart of Sentry, even more powerful, and absolutely without remorse.

He spreads this void, a dark energy force, across New York throwing everyone it touches into their own “shame room,” a personal replaying of the worst moment of their life which endlessly repeats. It’s like going to Hell.

Yelena had previously developed a connection with Bob over their mutual depression, self-loathing, and suicidal tendencies. She tries to use that to reach him, deliberately entering the Void. She goes back to that nightmarish moment of getting her friend killed and then passing through different depressing memories of her Red Room training.

She finally finds Bob, not Sentry or Void, but Bob, in what was probably his childhood bedroom. Downstairs, his past self is being verbally berated and then brutally beaten by his Dad, Bob’s own shame room.

Yelena convinces him to fight back but the Void starts assaulting them. That’s when the rest of the Thunderbolts, who entered the darkness to find Yelena, come to the rescue.

Finally, in order to get out, Bob has to confront his negative self in a recreation of the lab that spawned him. Bob gets the upper hand and is beating up Void, but is about to become the darkness himself. Yelena and then the rest of the team convince him he’s not alone, and that, if not destroys the Void, at least puts him back in the proverbial bottle. Everyone finds themselves back in the real world and the darkness lifts from over the city. Bob is Bob again, with almost no memory, endearing but clueless.

Our team finds de Fontaine alone and without backup and are about to arrest her when they end up in a press conference de Fontaine previously arranged. She presents the team as “The New Avengers” which she has created to protect the world.

For some reason, this makes it impossible for Bucky to arrest her and drag her before Congress, but it does mean that they can blackmail her so that she’ll fund their team and otherwise leave them alone.

This is a movie that lives or dies on the audience relating to the darkness within themselves/ourselves. We are supposed to see our own vulnerabilities, especially when we feel unwanted, inadequate, and alone, and also discover that the path out of the abyss is each other.

It’s not a bad message really and it’s what saves the film.

The mid-credits scene is just Alexei trying to get some random woman in a supermarket to recognize him from a picture of the “New Avengers” on a box of cereal.

The end-credits scene is a little more illuminating. Fourteen months later, the team is gathered in “Watchtower.” The world doesn’t accept them as “Avengers” in the light of Sam Wilson’s Captain America and the Avengers team he is supposed to be assembling (see Captain America: Brave New World).

They do get information on a “multi-dimensional” ship entering the atmosphere. A satellite image shows a sleek, old-school missile shaped rocket with a stylized numeral “4” on the hull. Yeah, the Fantastic Four from The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) is coming as a setup for the upcoming film Avengers: Doomsday (2026).

Now, we wait a year.

From what I’ve gathered online, Marvel is going to throw every superhero they’ve ever had anything to do with AND the kitchen sink into this movie, so we can expect to see everyone I’ve mentioned to come back again, yes, even Bob.

“Thunderbolts” is okay. It’s dark humor and lessons in mental health which serves a purpose. It’s sometimes hard to relate to most of the characters, but at least they told a more or less straightforward story, unlike Superman (2025) which I recently reviewed.

Not a bad way to kill a couple of hours.