Thunderbolts*Save

Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) has not been herself since Natasha's death. She has spent the post-Black-Widow years as a contract killer for Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), the acting CIA director who has built her career assembling deniable Avengers from the corners of the MCU's roster. The film opens with Yelena on a Kuala Lumpur rooftop completing one of these jobs — the methodical assassination of a Damage Control inspector — and then standing in the rain wondering, out loud and at length, when killing people stopped feeling like enough to fill a day. Pugh plays the opener as undisguised depression; the entire film is a meditation on what people who hate themselves do when forced into the same room.

Yelena is summoned back to Washington and given what Valentina calls a 'house-cleaning' job. Her targets, she is told, are loose ends from old Hydra and Red Room operations being held in an underground CIA facility called OXE-7. Valentina assigns three other operatives to the same mission and lies to each of them about the others. John Walker / US Agent (Wyatt Russell), still bitter about being stripped of the Cap mantle, is told he is rescuing a hostage. Antonia Dreykov / Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) is told she is killing the people who held her captive. Ava Starr / Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) is told that OXE-7 contains the only researcher on Earth who can stabilise her phasing condition. All four converge in the same vault and within forty seconds are shooting at each other.

Trapped in the vault as Valentina remotely seals the blast doors, the four realisiz they have been set up. Valentina is destroying the OXE-7 facility — and them with it — to bury evidence of an illegal Hydra-era research project called Sentry. Antonia is killed in the firefight, a brutal early-act gut-punch that establishes the film's willingness to spend major characters quickly. Yelena, Walker and Ghost are forced to cooperate to escape, and in the deepest vault of the facility they find a teenager named Bob Reynolds (Lewis Pullman) — barefoot, pyjama-clad, no memory of his name, but glowing faintly when stressed. Bob is the project. Bob is the Sentry.

Bob's powers, when they trigger, are catastrophic. The first time he panics in the vault, he tears the door off and instinctively pulps a guard against a wall. The second time, deep in the third act, he generates a roughly forty-square-block extradimensional 'Void' that swallows part of New York City. Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), a sitting US congressman in this film and the only member of the future team who has not yet appeared, is monitoring the OXE-7 incident from a Senate intelligence subcommittee and quickly puts together that Valentina is operating an off-books program that violates the Sokovia Accords. He intercepts the survivors as they flee the facility, recruits them onto a shared bus heading to Manhattan, and the team begins to coalesce — by accident, around a teenager none of them know how to handle.

Bob's backstory is filled in via flashback and Bob's own halting, drug-fogged recollections. He grew up in a working-class household with an abusive alcoholic father. He was recruited as a young adult into a Hydra-funded clinical trial that promised a cure for opioid addiction; the cure turned out to be Project Sentry, an attempt to recreate the super-soldier serum by combining it with a Hydra mysticism program called the Void Initiative. Bob got the powers and also, as a side-effect, an alternate personality — a depressive avatar called the Void that manifests externally as a swirling negative-space cloud capable of phasing entire buildings out of reality. The Void is, the film explicitly says, Bob's depression made literal.

Red Guardian / Alexei Shostakov (David Harbor) — Yelena's adoptive father and the Soviet Union's washed-up Captain America equivalent — joins the team in a borrowed Camry, having heard from his Telegram chats that his daughter is in trouble. Harbor's Red Guardian provides almost all of the film's comic relief: he wears the costume two sizes too small, refers to himself in the third person, lectures Walker on what a real super-soldier is, and at one point tries to start a kitchen-counter argument with Bucky about whose serum was better. But Alexei is also the only adult on the team who has been parenting before, and his confused, clumsy attempts to mother Bob give the film its emotional spine.

Valentina, meanwhile, has not given up. She holds a press conference reframing the team as the official replacement for the Avengers — calls them, with a smirk, 'the Thunderbolts' — and tries to fold them publicly into a CIA-sponsored hero program. The branding is supposed to give her plausible cover for Bob, whom she still considers her property and is desperate to retrieve. Bob, who has watched the press conference live, has a quiet psychotic break in a Manhattan diner; the Void begins to leak out of him; and within minutes Midtown has been swallowed into a colorless extradimensional bubble. Thousands of civilians are trapped in personal hellscapes — each one stuck reliving their worst memory in a frozen tableau, drawn from Bob's own depressive imagery.

Yelena, Bucky, Walker, Ghost and Red Guardian enter the Void to bring Bob back. Each of them is forced to walk through a personal nightmare — Yelena her childhood Red Room cell, Bucky his Winter Soldier kill list, Walker the New Yorker he killed with the shield, Ghost the lab accident that ruined her body, Alexei his decades of irrelevance. None of them can fight the Void directly. The film's climax is not a battle. The team fights their way through the nightmares not to defeat anything but to reach the figure of Bob, sitting in a featureless white room, and to physically pull him out by the hand. Yelena, who has spent the entire film walking through her own version of this room since Natasha died, is the one who gets through to him.

Bob comes back. The Void retracts; midtown unfreezes; the trapped civilians wake up disoriented but alive. Valentina's troops move in to take Bob into custody, and the team — for the first time, voluntarily, as a unit — physically refuse to hand him over. The film cuts to a public press conference of their own, hijacked from Valentina's stage, in which Bucky outs Project Sentry on live television, displays the Hydra paper trail, and announces that the people standing next to him are no longer Valentina's contractors but, in fact, the official new Avengers. The post-credits asterisk on the title card finally resolves: the team is the Avengers in everything but contract.

The mid-credits scene flashes forward fourteen months. Sam Wilson is meeting with Yelena's team in a converted compound outside Manhattan, a battered Avengers tower behind them. Bucky is in a Congressional hearing testifying about Valentina. Valentina is on the run. Bob is alive, medicated, in therapy, working as the team's reserve member — Lewis Pullman's Sentry is being treated by Marvel as the post-Endgame heavy who will eventually shake the next two phases. A ship breaks through Earth's atmosphere and skids to a halt over Manhattan; the team looks up. The scene cuts to a teaser for Avengers: Doomsday. Schreier's film, often described before release as the small character study the MCU did not deserve, turns out to have been the soft-launch of the next two crossover events — but on the terms of the people the MCU had previously written off.