1. “Thunderbolts” (PG-13) Trailer
The 36th movie in the MCU essentially focuses on Marvel’s B-team, a group of antiheroes manipulated by the director of the CIA, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) to run covert missions for her.
If you experienced superhero burnout after “Avengers: Endgame”, you may not recognize anyone other than Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan). So here’s a rundown on everyone else . . .
“Black Widow” star Florence Pugh returns as Natasha’s adopted sister Yelena Belova. At the end of “Black Widow”, Valentina tried to convince her Hawkeye was responsible for Natasha’s death and sent her to kill him. She didn’t. But Yelena wanted to, and that didn’t get resolved until the “Hawkeye” miniseries.
In “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” miniseries we met John Walker (Wyatt Russell). He was that low rent Captain America the government replaced Steve Rogers with . . . until he beat someone to death with his shield. After his dishonorable discharge, he went to work for the CIA under the name U.S. Agent.
The second Ant-Man movie “Ant-Man and the Wasp” introduced us to Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen). She’s the S.H.I.E.L.D. operative whose molecular instability allows her to phase through objects.
“Black Widow” also introduced us to Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), the Red Room assassin who can mimic any fighting style . . . and the Red Guardian (David Harbour), Yelena and Natasha’s super soldier dad.
Now that you’re up to speed on most of the key players . . .
The movie starts out with Valentina trying to get rid of evidence of all her shady black ops dealings to avoid Congressional scrutiny. So she lures Yelena, Ghost, Walker, and Taskmaster to a covert facility and tries to have them killed.
Bucky and the Red Guardian join them after their escape. And Bucky’s the one who rallies the team into stepping up to be heroes after the villain shows up.
Critics are giving the movie a lot of love, especially for how it handles some of the darker aspects of mental health.
Most of the praise is split between Florence Pugh and Lewis Pullman, who’s new to the MCU. He plays a random guy named Bob that our heroes meet in Valentina’s deathtrap, who’s later revealed to be a lot more than he appears.
