Divalicious Review! A Depressed Florence Pugh Lightens Marvel’s Thunderbolts
By Caroline Cao | May 3, 2025 | Celebrity & Culture
In a post-Avengers era, sometimes hope is found in a group of losers. That’s the M.O. of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Thunderbolts* directed by Jake Schreier.
The center of this film is Florence Pugh’s Yelena, a Red Room-trained assassin who has gotten bored with her spate of mercenary work. So bored is she that she even confides in one of her collateral hostages. Although I missed out on the Black Widow film, the film does a banger job at introducing Yelena and her malaise.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus is back as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, the wannabe Agent Coulson recruiter in this case. She’s an unlikable CIA agent out to establish herself through her unethical experiments. Louis-Dreyfus has a delicious time playing a selfish corrupt agent who is bullshitting her next move.
So when Val hires Yelana to clear a loose end in an isolated facility, Yelena finds not only a trap, but a few other disposable assassins once hired by Val: disgraced Captain America successor John Walker (Wyatt Russell) with his mighty bulletproof shield, Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen, whose character feels underbaked sadly) as the Ghost that can pass through objects, and random nobody named Bob (Lewis Pullman).
Oh, Bob. He is important to the plot. And what Pullman does with this mysterious character is a feat in itself, bringing in an everyman charm that belies a dark past.
This ragtag group is also joined by Alexei Shostakov, aka Red Guardian (a scene-stealing, charming David Harbour), Yelena’s embarrassing, loving father figure with a wrestler-level appetite for glory. The Winter Soldier himself, a Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) fresh out of a failing political career, soon joins the fray to investigate Val.
This is all fun because they—a cluster of a hot mess—are not the most remarkable people in the world. Yelena herself has her own baggage to deal with, which becomes integral to taking down an antagonist force (one of the surprisingly best sculpted designs you wouldn’t expect to see in a live-action film). The Thunderbolts themselves (the background of the name is hilarious) are an anti-Avengers with some nobility but not cut out to be paragons of haloed goodness. When Thunderbolts whirls toward its psychological finale, it’s clear that it cannot easily punch away (literally) its problems.
Thankfully, the movie also utilizes well-choreographed action that’s idiosyncratic to each fighting style. A tidy one allows those styles to be comprehensible.
Does Thunderbolts hit as a setup-y kind of MCU film? Yes. Are you happy with the journey you took with this crew? Also yes.
Photo credit: Disney
