Reviewed by The Update | Entertainment Section
Florence Pugh fights the good fight. Sadly, the rest of the movie taps out in round one.
★☆☆☆☆
1 out of 5 stars
A team-up with all the electricity of a dead phone battery.
If Thunderbolts was meant to be Marvel’s answer to DC’s Suicide Squad, it’s more like a very expensive PowerPoint presentation about how to waste a perfectly good cast. This should have been a lean, chaotic, morally messy action movie, instead, we got two hours of dimly lit conference rooms, limp action beats, and characters that feel like they were copied from abandoned drafts of better Marvel scripts.
The movie opens with the team being assembled, a moment that should crackle with tension, personality, and danger. Instead, it feels like watching HR introduce new hires over a Zoom call. They’re supposedly the “edgy” ones, the morally grey heroes with questionable pasts, but here they might as well be ordering lunch. The camera lingers like it’s waiting for something interesting to happen. Spoiler: nothing does.
Characters as Flat as Comic Book Paper
Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova is the single spark in this blackout of a movie – sharp, wry, effortlessly charismatic. The problem? Not enough screen time. When she is on screen, she’s orbiting actors who seem either miscast, half-asleep, or reading their lines off the catering menu. Give her more dialogue, better scene partners, and a script that doesn’t treat her like an afterthought, and maybe we’d be talking about a win here. Instead, we’re left with glimpses of the movie we wish existed.
The Winter Soldier we already know. The rest of the team? You could swap their names and powers around and it wouldn’t matter. They’re walking archetypes, each introduced with a clumsy “as you know” backstory dump, then forgotten until the next scene requires a slow-motion group shot. One actor in particular looks like they’re auditioning for a completely different movie – and not a good one.
The Plot? Mission Impossible – But Without the Impossible
Plot structure? Barely. The film stumbles from action scene to action scene with no sense of escalation, tension, or even basic geography. The “covert mission” at the story’s heart is neither covert nor much of a mission. Things just… happen. The team runs somewhere, exchanges three lines of exposition, fights nameless goons in shaky close-up, then stands around waiting for the next scene to load.
Even the humor, once Marvel’s secret weapon, is missing in action. We counted. Not one laugh in our screening. Not even a pity chuckle. The script’s idea of wit is someone muttering “Well, that happened” after a fight scene. Thanks, Marvel. Comedy gold.
Marvel’s Grit Filter: Now With 90% More Grey
Thunderbolts seems desperate to look “dark and gritty,” but all it manages is “dark” – literally. Half the movie looks like it was shot inside a shoebox. The action sequences blur into a fog of shadows and digital debris. You know a fight scene is in trouble when you can’t tell if the hero’s punching the villain or a curtain.
The tone is equally murky. Sometimes it wants to be a brutal, character-driven drama. Sometimes it wants to be a snarky team comedy. The end result is tonal whiplash so severe we’re considering filing a workplace injury report.
A Corporate Checkmark, Not a Movie
At its worst, Thunderbolts feels like Marvel ticking boxes: assemble cast, hint at shared trauma, drop CGI battle in third act, tease next installment. It’s a content pipeline product, not a film. The stakes are non-existent, the world-building paper-thin, and the “big twist” lands with the force of a damp sponge.
Yes, it’ll make money. And no, we don’t understand why.
Final Verdict
Thunderbolts is a zero-energy slog – a charisma vacuum stuffed with exposition, murky visuals, and squandered talent. Florence Pugh deserved better. We all did.
If this is Marvel’s bold new direction, it’s time to turn the car around before we hit another Morbius.
