The MCU has often looked lost in the six years since Avengers: Endgame. There’s a lot of different directions to point fingers, whether it’s the sheer volume of content, the haphazardly presented multiverse, or the unclear status of the Avengers team that nominally ties all the heroes together. 2021’s Black Widow displayed many of the inherent issues with this current era of Marvel, looking backwards at a time when everyone wondered what was next, a humorous façade to cover up the lack of purpose at the core of its narrative.

Too often, the MCU has felt like homework without any real payoff. In the old days, the A-list stars would rarely take more than a year off between appearances. Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, and Avengers: Infinity War all premiered within a four-year window, the same amount of time that has lapsed since Black Widow’s release. Three of its characters play major roles in Thunderbolts*, with only Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova popping up in the MCU since 2021, making an appearance in a single episode of Hawkeye.

In theory, Thunderbolts* should represent everything currently wrong with the MCU, a cast of B-tier heroes from a scattered MCU offering. Yelena is joined by her Black Widow costars, father Red Guardian (David Harbour) and villain turned hero Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko). The team also includes Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), last seen in 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp, John Walker (Wyatt Russell), last seen in 2021’s television show Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and the Winter Solider himself (Sebastian Stan), the film’s closest thing to a front tier star. Anyone looking at the spread from which Thunderbolts* draws its cast might roll their eyes at the amount of homework required to comprehend this expansive web.

To the film’s immense credit, Thunderbolts* follows one of the key pillars of comic books in maintaining accessibility for members of the audience who are bound to struggle to keep up with where they’ve last seen everyone. February’s Captain America: Brave New World leaned heavily on 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, the MCU’s second entry, a bizarre narrative choice that functioned like an anchor strangling the entire film. Building off much newer material, Thunderbolts* rarely finds itself bogged down with canon.

The film largely centers its narrative around a botched mission planned by Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who’s popped up in Black Widow, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the latter appearance having been much derided by yours truly) that aimed to get rid of her troublesome assets by sending them to kill each other. The team quickly discovers her plan in a remote base, along with Bob (Lewis Pullman), who’s unaware of his identity as the highly unstable split personality of The Sentry and The Void, essentially a version of Superman with severe mental illness.

Director Jake Schreier keeps things rolling through its relatively brisk 126-minute runtime. There’s a lot of signature MCU humor, mostly building off the strong rapport between Pugh and Harbour from Black Widow, along with plenty of jokes about the team’s underpowered nature. After mostly pulling villain duties in Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Russell brings a lot of levity to John Walker. Stan is somewhat underutilized around the peripherals of the team, letting the newer players take the reins.

The action sequences are well-choreographed. None of the fight scenes are jaw-dropping, but it’s also refreshing not to see every MCU battle devolve into everyone firing light beams at each other. The third act hits a few pacing snags, but shows a lot of restraint as far as typical blockbusters go. Thunderbolts* drama is remarkably human, the product of well-crafted storytelling that actually puts in the legwork to deliver a satisfying resolution.

The film does have a few dull moments. Louis-Dreyfus is one of the finest actors currently working, but de Fontaine is a dud of a character through her four MCU appearances, existing at the center of a silly impeachment storyline that Wendell Pierce tries admirably to salvage. As far as shady heads of government agencies go, de Fontaine falls well short of Nick Fury and Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (whose nickname is coincidentally the same as this team’s name), the latter of whom would have been a good fit for this film had it not been for the events of Brave New World.

Thunderbolts*’s crowning achievement is the way it defies a lot of criticisms currently levied at the MCU. The film doesn’t shoot for the moon, but packs a punch with its smaller-scale entertainment. The film does benefit from a level of MCU knowledge that’s bound to be over the heads of many in the audience, but it doesn’t rely on references. Nobody would be lost if they didn’t have a great memory of what happened in Black Widow or Ant-Man and the Wasp. 

Perhaps most impressive is the way the film answers the question that many have had on their mind since Endgame, namely, what the MCU is building toward. There are real, substantive answers here that don’t come at the expense of the narrative. Thunderbolts* builds toward the future without losing its footing in the present. This film is proof that the MCU doesn’t need to throw out its fascination with new characters or its web of connectivity. The MCU just needs to tell good stories.