Column Superhero Movie Rewatch “We’re all losers, and we lost” — Thunderbolts* This movie is an absolute delight — while also dealing with some serious themes. By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on December 4, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share From August 2017 – January 2020, Keith R.A. DeCandido took a weekly look at every live-action movie based on a superhero comic that had been made to date in the Superhero Movie Rewatch. He’s periodically revisited the feature to look back at new releases, as well as a few he missed the first time through. In 1991, a whole bunch of Marvel’s most popular artists—who’d become fan favorites working on titles featuring Spider-Man and/or the X-Men—decided to quit Marvel and form their own company, where they could produce superhero titles that they owned and controlled. Thus, Image Comics was born. Trust me, this all relates to Thunderbolts*… Five years later, the sales on several of Marvel’s flagship titles—those featuring the Avengers and the Fantastic Four—were poor. In a radical move, Marvel decided to outsource those titles to two of the artists who’d gone over to Image, Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld. In-universe, there was a major crossover called “Onslaught,” which ended with the apparent deaths of the Avengers and FF—but in truth, they were sent to a pocket universe created by Franklin Richards, the child of Reed and Sue Richards of the FF. Meanwhile, in the mainline Marvel universe, a team of all-new heroes who called themselves the Thunderbolts appeared to fill the gap left behind by the removal of so many heroes. While the team was created by Kurt Busiek & Mark Bagley, they first appeared in Incredible Hulk #449 by Peter David & Mike Deodato Jr., then were seen in their own title by Busiek & Bagley shortly thereafter. The twist came at the end of the first issue of their title, when it was revealed that the Thunderbolts were, in fact, a bunch of long-time Marvel super-villains in disguise, led by Baron Zemo (posing as Citizen V). They were engaged in a long con, acting as heroes in order to win the trust of the people of Earth before betraying them and taking over. Eventually, the team became proper heroes, as all the ex-villains—save for Zemo and the Fixer (posing as Techno)—decided they like being good guys more than being bad guys. Hawkeye—himself a reformed villain—took over as team leader for a time. The outsourcing of the Avengers and FF titles only lasted a year, and they were returned to the mainline Marvel Universe, but the Thunderbolts also remained a going concern. They have gone through numerous incarnations in the two-and-a-half decades since, including being renamed the Dark Avengers for a time. The notion of adding the Thunderbolts to the Marvel Cinematic Universe originally came from James Gunn, though his interest in doing a Marvel movie about a group of villains doing heroic things waned after he wound up doing something similar for DC with The Suicide Squad. After Black Widow wrapped, that film’s co-writer Eric Pearson pitched a Thunderbolts movie, with Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova headlining. While the two villains who formed Thunderbolts groups in the comics—Zemo and Thaddeus Ross—were potentially available, it was decided not to go that route precisely to avoid comparisons to the two Suicide Squad movies. The seeds for this movie were sown, not just in Black Widow, but also in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Hawkeye, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Captain America: Brave New World. In particular, the introduction of CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine sets up much of this movie, as de Fontaine’s use of costumed heroes to do black ops is seen in several of the above stories. Most of the main characters in this film appeared in prior MCU films. The exception is Sentry, a character created by Paul Jenkins, Jae Lee, & Rick Veitch for an eponymous 2000 miniseries. A powerful hero who watches over the world to protect it against the Void, Sentry was retconned into Marvel’s history, but had never been seen or mentioned before because the Void erased all knowledge of Sentry and Void—who, it turns out, are two halves of the same person. Sentry has appeared in several Avengers comics since his intro, including the Dark Avengers. Back from Brave New World is Sebastian Stan as the Winter Soldier. Back from Wakanda Forever is Julia Louis-Dreyfus as de Fontaine. Back from Hawkeye is Pugh as Belova. Back from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is Wyatt Russell as John Walker/U.S.Agent. Back from Black Widow are David Harbour as the Red Guardian and Olga Kuryenko as Taskmaster. Back from Ant-Man & the Wasp is Hannah John-Kamen as the Ghost. Introduced in this film are Lewis Pullman as Sentry, Geraldine Viswanathan as Mel, Chris Bauer as Holt, and the great Wendell Pierce (who will next be seen in this rewatch in Superman) as Congressman Gary, who is holding hearings investigating de Fontaine. Many of the above will appear next in Avengers: Doomsday. Thunderbolts*Written by Eric Pearson and Joanna CaloDirected by Jake SchreierProduced by Kevin FeigeOriginal release date: May 2, 2025 “We’re just disposable delinquents” Credit: Marvel Studios Yelena Belova is depressed. She’s just going through the motions—in this case, her latest mission for CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. She’s to dispose of a lab in Kuala Lumpur. A scientist—who insists that de Fontaine doesn’t understand the reality of what happened with the Sentry Project—tries to stop her with a gun that he isn’t very good at shooting, and winds up with his face blown off. This means Belova can’t get into the lab to destroy the evidence she’s there to destroy, as it’s behind a facial recognition lock. So she blows up the whole lab. (She does save the guinea pig they were using as a lab animal.) Meanwhile, de Fontaine is being investigated by a congressional committee. (One of the people observing is first-year congressman James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes, who has apparently won the Brooklyn congressional seat he was running for in Brave New World.) Prior to being appointed head of the CIA, she was the head of OXE, and while she says she’s divested herself of all holdings in OXE, she’s still on the advisory board. The chair of the committee, Congressman Gary, believes that she’s still more involved, and that OXE is involved in human experimentation in an attempt to create new superheroes. De Fontaine speechifies, pointing out that the Avengers are gone, but threats still exist, plus the last president turned into a big red rage monster. After walking out of the hearing, de Fontaine asks her assistant Mel for an update. Mel reports that all the evidence is in the vault, and she’s sent all but one of the assets to the vault. De Fontaine guesses who the exception is. Belova has gone to visit her surrogate father, Red Guardian, who is now living in Baltimore, running a limo company, and pretending to still be a superhero. He and Belova haven’t spoken in a year, and she bares her soul to him, expressing her depression and that she’s thinking of quitting working for de Fontaine. Red Guardian’s response to this is to ask for de Fontaine’s number, as he’d kill to work for her. Belova then calls de Fontaine, and says that after this next job, she wants a more front-facing job—like her sister. De Fontaine says that, after this next job, they’ll discuss it. First, she has to go to a vault in a mountain in the middle of nowhere, where a rogue agent known as the Ghost is trying to steal OXE’s stuff. Belova is to follow her in, see what she steals, and dispose of her. When she arrives, she’s surprised to see U.S.Agent, who is targeting her—and Taskmaster, who is targeting U.S.Agent, while Ghost is targeting Taskmaster. In addition, there’s a seemingly unpowered civilian there named Bob. It soon becomes clear that they were all sent there to kill each other, and if they didn’t succeed, they’re going to be incinerated. Alas, they don’t learn this until after Ghost kills Taskmaster. U.S.Agent doesn’t believe this, as he’s a genuine hero, not like the others, plus he’s got a family. (At this point, Ghost and Belova remind him that he stopped being the official Captain America when he killed an innocent civilian.) The vault is sealed off and the heat starts to rise. There’s a convenient countdown of two minutes. In D.C., de Fontaine is holding a party for the families of first responders that’s full of Avengers memorabilia. Gary calls her out for her “fake party” as a PR move, while Bucky tries to work Mel, giving her a business card. Mel then surprises de Fontaine by informing her that the assets that were supposed to either kill each other or get incinerated are, instead, working together. De Fontaine is pissed, and also confused as to who Bob is, instructing Mel to find out. Back at the vault, they are able to destroy the machine that is keeping Ghost from phasing through the door. Ghost then opens the door just as the room is incinerated. She almost left them behind, but the lift isn’t working, so she decides she needs help. Credit: Marvel Studios When they’re blown out of the vault, Bob and Belova make skin-to-skin contact, and Belova finds herself reliving one of the tests she underwent in the Red Room as a child: luring one of her fellow trainees—a little girl—to her death in the forest. Belova tries to calm a very frightened Bob down, especially since he has no memory of what happened to him. He had been off wandering through Malaysia, agreed to do a medical trial, and the next thing he knew he was in the vault watching these people try to kill each other. As they’re being driven home in a limo, de Fontaine instructs Mel to send Holt—her chief of security—and his troops to the vault to take care of the assets that had the temerity not to kill each other. Mel also has learned who Bob is: one of the test subjects for the Sentry Project. They assumed he was dead, which is why his corpse was sent to the vault—but apparently, he’s alive. This thrills de Fontaine. After they leave the limo, we see that Red Guardian is the driver. U.S.Agent has found a shaft that will lead to the surface. But none of them can fly and it’s too far for even the super soldier serum-enhanced U.S.Agent to jump. Bob suggests they stand back to back, lock arms, and climb up the shaft. This barely works, and then they’re stuck with what to do when they get to the top. U.S.Agent decides to grab Belova’s staffs and use them to get through the hatch, with Ghost able to cling to the side, Belova able to cling to Ghost, and her widow’s line catching Bob. An unapologetic U.S.Agent helps Bob up, at which point he flashes back to a bitter argument between him and his wife. Mel calls Bucky and it turns out she does have reservations about what de Fontaine is doing. She encourages him to track her phone. When de Fontaine and Mel arrive at the vault, the former tells Holt to go non-lethal. Holt is disappointed, as he’d planned for lethal, but de Fontaine doesn’t want Bob to catch a stray bullet. In the vault, the assets realize they have to get through the troops. Ghost goes off to get them transportation, while Belova plans to knock out the lights with an explosion, then, when Holt’s troops come in with their night-vision goggles, turn the lights back on, blinding them. U.S.Agent doesn’t like this plan, as explosions have too many variables, but Belova insists. U.S.Agent thinks he should be the leader, and cites not just his military record, but also how many presidents he’s shaken hands with and his high-school football record. Belova snarkily counters with the terrible soccer team she played on when she was part of a fake American family in the 1990s, the West Chesapeake Valley Thunderbolts, sponsored by Shane’s Tire Shop. Bob sticks with Belova, who continues to try to be friendly and encouraging to him, and also protects him during the ensuing fight. That fight goes rather poorly, as the explosion fried the lights, so Belova’s plan doesn’t quite work. However, they manage to take out Holt’s troops and sneak out in uniforms, and then head away in a truck Ghost stole. However, they’re stopped at a checkpoint where U.S.Agent utterly fails to bluff his way past the guard. Bob takes matters into his own hands, grabbing a rifle and shooting randomly. Holt’s people shoot the crap out of him, to de Fontaine’s horror—but then, to everyone’s shock, Bob proves completely immune to those bullets. He then flies into the air, is shocked, starts to run out of air, and passes out, falling to the earth at what would be terminal velocity for someone who wasn’t invulnerable. The impact crater he makes totals the truck, so Belova, U.S.Agent, and Ghost have to proceed on foot. Eventually, they come across Red Guardian, who warns Belova not to go into the vault, as de Fontaine will incinerate them. Belova initially tries to pretend Red Guardian doesn’t exist, but they all get into his limo to escape. Red Guardian thinks they’re a team, prompting U.S.Agent to snarkily call them the West Chesapeake Valley Thunderbolts. Red Guardian is thrilled that Belova named them after her soccer team, but they all insist that they’re not a team. Credit: Marvel Studios De Fontaine has Bob brought back to the base—not to D.C., as Mel thinks, but to the place in New York. Mel points out that they stopped renovations when they stopped the project, but de Fontaine tells her to start them back up. Holt’s people catch up to them, and start shooting at the not-as-bulletproof-as-Red-Guardian-says-it-is limo. The same sonic blast they used against the Ghost in the vault is in use here, so she can’t do anything, and U.S.Agent’s shield is the only thing keeping them alive. Then Bucky shows up, taking out all three APVs, then taking the four of them hostage. He wants to bring them back to D.C. to testify before the committee. He also expresses sympathy to U.S.Agent over his wife and kid leaving him, information that surprises the others. The place in New York where de Fontaine has set up shop is the old Avengers Tower, which she apparently bought from Stark Enterprises. De Fontaine has brought Bob there, explaining that the others are criminals, and that he should only trust her. He will become the finest superhero in the world, Sentry. At one point they touch, at which point de Fontaine flashes back to her childhood in Italy when her father was killed. Mel is concerned, worried that someone with Bob’s litany of mental health issues shouldn’t be given superpowers. You give Steve Rogers a super-soldier serum, he becomes Captain America, but you give it to Bob, and you don’t know what you’ll get. After de Fontaine completely dismisses her concerns, Mel calls Bucky, expressing fear about Bob. Bucky has been hearing about Bob from his four new prisoners and not entirely believing them, but now he’s convinced. So they head to New York. The Thunderbolts arrive at what is now called the Watchtower. At first, they fight de Fontaine’s guards, but then she just invites them upstairs to the same room with a bar where Tony Stark confronted Loki in Avengers. The Thunderbolts plan to take de Fontaine in, but she has a Hulk Sentry. The Thunderbolts utterly fail to even come close to the vaguest possibility of any kind of inkling of harming Sentry. Eventually, they retreat. On the street, they admit defeat, with Belova in particular going on at great length about how pathetic they are. She storms off, but Red Guardian goes after her. She castigates him for ignoring her for a year, and he apologizes, saying he’s here now. Upstairs, Sentry refuses to go after the Thunderbolts. He wonders why, if he’s virtually a god, he has to listen to what de Fontaine says. With a sigh, de Fontaine is about to throw the kill switch, but Sentry is too fast, and he almost chokes her to death before Mel activates the kill switch, then demands a raise. Unfortunately, the kill switch didn’t actually kill Sentry, it just allowed his other personality to come to the fore: the Void, which starts seemingly disintegrating people and plunging New York into darkness. Holt’s people go after the Void, which just results in a lot of property damage. The Thunderbolts try to rescue people, but it’s a losing battle, as the Void keeps wiping out more people. Credit: Marvel Studios Belova, however, steps into the darkness on purpose. The other Thunderbolts debate whether to follow her in—it’s possible she was simply disintegrated—but they’re getting to the point where they have little to lose… Belova finds herself back in the forest where she led Anya to her death, which she’d flashed back on earlier. After trying to stop Anya from being killed, and instead reliving it over and over, she manages to escape to another room, where she and other children were locking and loading pistols. Belova was the fastest, and the other girls were whipped for not being first. Then she sees Bob in a mirror, and breaks through to find herself in a bathroom with a version of herself at her lowest point, drunk and mourning Natasha. She eventually finds Bob in an upstairs attic, where he’s hiding as his abusive father and his mother fight below. He explains that he has no control over the Void, which then uses the furniture and bric-a-brac in the attic to try to kill them—or at least hurt them, as Bob says they can’t die here. But then the other Thunderbolts show up to rescue them. Apparently, they went through some shame rooms of their own. (Bucky says wryly, “I’m fine—I had a great past, I’m totally fine.”) Bob has said that this attic is the best place here, so Belova suggests the way out is to go to the worst place. They go through several of Bob’s shame rooms—including one where he’s a sign-twirling chicken, during a time when he was on meth—before finding themselves at the same lab that Belova blew up at the top of the film. The Void physically traps the Thunderbolts, then Bob confronts him, beating him up repeatedly. However, that’s what the Void wants, and the darkness starts to claim Bob. Belova manages to break free with Red Guardian’s help and tries to hold Bob back. The others also break free and do the same, and the power of the group hug gets them back onto 42nd Street… the darkness retreating, the people all restored, and Bob once again not remembering anything. The press de Fontaine had Mel gather to announce Sentry’s defeat of the rogue criminals who blew up an OXE vault are present, and de Fontaine switches gears, announcing that this team that just defeated the Void are the new Avengers. Belova whispers to de Fontaine that they own her now. And the asterisk on the title is finally explained: the real title of the movie is: Thunderbolts* (*The New Avengers). Fourteen months later, it’s clear that the public has not embraced these new Avengers even a little bit. (Headlines include “Not My Avengers” and “B-vengers” and “The ‘Huh?’ Heard ’Round the World.”) Apparently, Sam Wilson is trying to put together his own Avengers and also has filed for the trademark. (The dialogue says copyright, but it’d be the trademark he’d have to get.) Red Guardian’s solution is for them to call themselves “Avengerz.” Then they detect a ship that has entered their universe through a dimensional portal. It has a stylized “4” on it. Credit: Marvel Studios “Your light is dim, even by Eastern European standards” This movie is an absolute delight, partly because it doesn’t entirely follow the expected formula. But it’s also got some disappointments, partly because, just like Brave New World, it apes the structure of another, better movie a little too much. One of the things I like best about this movie is that—like most of the MCU films—it’s not just a superhero movie. Just as Ant-Man was also a heist movie, Captain America: The Winter Soldier was also a political thriller, Black Panther was also an Afro-futurist tale, and so on, Thunderbolts* is a very powerful treatise on mental health issues in general and depression in particular. It starts with the very first scene, where Belova—who is so lackadaisical toward her work that she isn’t even wearing the battlesuit we saw her wear in Black Widow and Hawkeye, but is instead wearing sweats and a hoodie—is trying desperately to find some kind of meaning. Indeed, that’s true of pretty much all the characters herein. U.S.Agent is putting up a mediocre front as the operative who has his shit together, but we learn that he’s lost his family and is mostly known by the world at large as the failed Captain America. Bucky is not enjoying being a politician—his response to Gary’s throwing impeachment paperwork at him is to be bored to tears, and he jumps at the chance to do something superheroic instead. And Red Guardian is frustrated as hell by his life as a limo driver living in a crappy house in Baltimore. Ghost gets short shrift here, and it’s one of the movie’s flaws on two different levels. One is that Hannah John-Kamen is delightful, and it would’ve been nice to do more than pay lip service to her shitty life. Plus, she kills Taskmaster—which is another flaw—and aside from one very brief unsatisfying conversation with Belova, that isn’t even really dealt with. Indeed, one of the interesting things about Black Widow was Taskmaster being freed from the Red Room, with the promise of more development later, since she was underused in that film. Instead, she comes back long enough to be even more underused, getting all of one line of dialogue before she’s shot in the head. But the movie still works on so many levels, partly due to the sparkling dialogue that is a hallmark of most MCU films, partly due to superlative performances by everyone, and partly due to the climax not being a big-ass battle against a CGI monster of some sort. That last is particularly good, as watching superhero movies for the last eight years has engendered tremendous fight-the-CGI-monster-at-the-climax fatigue in your humble rewatcher. And I love that the method of stopping the Void was, basically, a group hug. We also have a great villain in de Fontaine. Julia Louis-Dreyfus imbues her with what Loki referred to as “glorious purpose” in Avengers, and her actual big-picture goals are, in the abstract, good ones, but oof are her means awful. She also has the same flaw here that we also saw in Wakanda Forever: she underestimates people. In particular, she puts way too much faith in her ability to control Sentry, something her assistant (who is also magnificently portrayed by Geraldine Viswanathan, whose banter with both Louis-Dreyfus and Sebastian Stan is letter-perfect) has figured out. The climax is trying a little too hard to ape Avengers, and for the second movie in a row, it doesn’t entirely work. It comes closer to making sense here, because de Fontaine is trying very hard to re-create the Avengers, and her buying Stark Tower and confronting them from the bar plays into that. But the scene doesn’t have anywhere near the verve of the scene in the 2012 film, and it’s never a good idea to remind people of a better movie. The movie is absolutely made by Florence Pugh and David Harbour, though. The pair of them continue the fantastic work they did in Black Widow, and while the third part of their triumvirate is seriously missed (I will never stop bitching about the idiotic decision to kill Natasha Romanoff in Avengers: Endgame), Romanoff’s death also dictates a lot of the character work done with both Belova and Red Guardian. Pugh’s laconic charm and Harbour’s bombastic scenery chewing are superb. My final complaint isn’t so much a problem with this film as a bit of a continuity issue that is probably at least partly the result of the movies since Endgame being made in the shadow of a global pandemic and two strikes. Both Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the after-credits scene of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings make it seem like the Avengers are still some kind of going concern, but Spider-Man: Far From Home made it seem like the Avengers are gone, while other movies were cagey on the subject. However, Brave New World and this movie have been explicit about the Avengers no longer being a thing, and that makes no sense. I guess we’ll have some kind of explanation next year when Avengers: Doomsday comes out… Next week, the Man of Steel is back! We take a look at the latest film version of Superman.[end-mark] The post “We’re all losers, and we lost” — <i>Thunderbolts*</i> appeared first on Reactor.