​Before the four, another Marvel: Schreier provides “Thunderbolts*” with lots of flash

By Greg Carlson

gregcarlson1@gmail.com

Anchored by the dependable Florence Pugh, “Thunderbolts*” easily tops “Captain America: Brave New World” to make it the most satisfying MCU movie of 2025 — so far. The asterisk alludes to an alternative title that appears onscreen as one of several end-credits revelations, but an equally welcome surprise is the realization that Kevin Feige could revitalize widespread interest in Marvel on the big screen as we look ahead to renditions of the Fantastic Four and the X-Men. Wrapping up Phase Five of what is arguably the most successful sustained brand of interconnected feature films in the history of Hollywood, director Jake Schreier’s bounce into the superhero game greatly benefits from the filmmaker’s interest in character-driven storytelling.

Devoted superhero fans don’t need any convincing to check out what’s on offer. And on the flipside, those who align with Martin Scorsese and don’t want the homework of keeping track of all the characters, callbacks and references across so many “amusement park ride” titles aren’t going to rush out to the box office, especially for a movie with minor league headliners. The challenge for Feige is simultaneously keeping all the crossovers and tie-ins unified while allowing the hired filmmakers enough room to put their personal stamps on features that should be allowed to stand on their own as self-contained pieces of entertainment. In that regard, “Thunderbolts*” pretty much gets to have its cake and eat it.

For the past several years, Schreier has been steadily racking up multiple music video and episodic television credits, including the AMC-distributed concert film “Chance the Rapper’s Magnificent Coloring World.” But his only two traditional narrative features prior to “Thunderbolts*” are 2012 debut “Robot & Frank” and the 2015 adaptation of John Green’s coming-of-age novel “Paper Towns.” Those two titles don’t necessarily anticipate a transition to the massive scale of apocalyptic set pieces and computer-generated visual effects for a full team of super agents, but Schreier handles explosions as comfortably as he mines the tortured and melodramatic psychological darkness plaguing Lewis Pullman’s godlike Sentry, an amnesiac more powerful than all the Avengers combined.

Two press narratives have routinely accompanied the film’s release. The first is that the Thunderbolts are Marvel’s answer to DC’s Suicide Squad, which, I suppose, works as a bit of shorthand to explain the group’s ragtag misfit status as a gang of expendable “punch and shoot” B-listers assigned to carry out thankless dirty work. The slippery and untrustworthy antagonist Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, might be in a few more scenes than necessary in this one; the movie rinses and repeats often enough. But Pugh rhymes with glue, and she holds together three worse-for-wear super soldiers (Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes, Wyatt Russell’s John Walker and David Harbour’s Alexei Shostakov) and the less impactful Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen).

The second narrative, buoyed by Pugh’s now seized-upon and oft-repeated suggestion in an “Empire” interview that “Thunderbolts*” “ … ended up becoming this quite badass indie, A24-feeling assassin movie with Marvel superheroes” is more of a stretch given the budget and saturation, but the sentiment activates conversation around the tone and the vibe, which drills deep into all kinds of somber mental health issues. The climactic outcome of the seemingly hopeless mission to stop Sentry/Void from snuffing out lives like an updated version of super-robot Gort blasting perceived threats in “The Day the Earth Stood Still” relies not on brute force but on intellect and empathy.