CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) is going to be impeached for various illegal operations, so she sends the team of Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), US agent John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ava Starr or the Ghost (Hannah Hohn-Kamen), and Antonia Dreykov or Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) on a covert mission. They are pitted against each other and Ghost kills Taskmaster, until a mysterious figure named Bob (Lewis Pullman) appears.
Realizing that they were sent to be killed to cover up de Fontaine’s misconduct, they escape the trap. Bob distracts de Fontaine’s agents and the others escape. Bob escapes by rising into the air, then crash lands. Back at their compound, Alexei Shostakov or the Red Guardian (David Harbour) rescues Belova, Walker, and Ghost. He calls the team Thunderbolts.
They are pursued by de Fontaine’s forces and seized by Bucky Barnes, Captain America’s WWII sidekick (Sebastian Stan), who wants them to testify in de Fontaine’s impeachment proceedings, but he joins the Thunderbolts. They infiltrate the old Avengers’ Tower in New York City, now called the Watchtower.
They discover that de Fontaine has turned Bob into a supremely powerful superhuman called the Sentry, who quickly wipes up the floor with the Thunderbolts, begins to develop a delusion of godlike superiority and then turns on de Fontaine. But her assistant, Mel (Geraldine Viswanathan) has installed in him a failsafe kill-switch. This changes him to another creature altogether called the Void, who wraps New York in a deadly supernatural darkness, within which the Thunderbolts save lives like the Avengers..
Belova enters the Shadow Dimension to get control over Bob’s mind, encountering her own traumatic and painful memories and Bob’s own fear. The rest of the team joins her and they turn to Bob’s past. They confront the Void and convince Bob that he is not alone, which cures him, bringing light to the City. Then they turn to de Fontaine. She stages a press conference and brands them as The New Avengers. In a post-credits scene, they receive a distress call from Space where a huge spacecraft emblazoned with the number 4 appears, headed for Earth.
The film was directed by Jake Schreier from a screenplay by Eric Pearson and Joanne Calo, rewritten by Lee Sung Jin. Thunderbolts appeared in Marvel Comics in the 1990s. The team was assembled by Baron Zemo and one of them was called Goliath or Atlas. Mentallo, who could read minds, was later called Techno. Genis-Vell, with cosmic abilities, was also called Legacy and for a time Captain Marvell. Writers Kurt Busick, Peter David, and Mike Deodato first drew the Thunderbolts for issue #449 of The Incredible Hulk. They were secretly the Masters of Evil, foes of the Avengers, which shocked the fans but created a sensation. They were used by the U.S. government to take down unregistered heroes.
When it came time to make a Thunderbolts film, it was feared that the Suicide Squad of DC Comics had pretty much sewn up the idea of a team of super-villains, so the villainous Thunderbolts became uncomfortable heroes, heirs to the Avengers’ crown, a mismatched team of outcasts who meld into a heroic team, compared in press releases to the Dirty Dozen. Scarlett Johansson was an executive producer.
The film is a surprising success, compared to recent superhero offerings. Marvel in particular had become grandiose, extra-galactic, and multi-dimensional, and audiences found comfort in a simple bunch of flawed losers becoming a team, with well-choreographed fights instead of voyages to the end of Space and Time and tours of the Multiverse. It seems more action-picture than science-fiction, more character-driven than space-fantasy driven, with the sprinkle of humour and pathos we expect in a Marvel movie..
Famously, Florence Pugh, who came to our attention in Black Widow, lobbied fiercely for the right to do her own stunts, including one in which she jumps off the second-tallest building in the world—the Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which is 118 stories or 2,722 feet tall.. The studio was horrified by the idea, but she pointed out the publicity value of having a team of three women (including her stunt-double and stunt-coordinator, whose last name is Moneymaker) break three different Guinness World Records in the same film. Unlike the rest of us, Pugh apparently loves heights.