Thunderbolts (2025)

  It's my birthday weekend!  And I have spent it going on ghost tours, wearing incredible outfits, watching aerial silk performers, and having a great time with all kinds of friends, near and far.  I also watched some movies.

Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) has been just existing since her sister Natasha died.  She's been doing freelance "cleanup" work for CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) but feels like she's drifting without purpose.  She takes one final job, catch a thief at a top-secret research facility, and then she plans to quit.  But the job is a trap to tie up all of Valentina's loose end covert operatives that she's been running like her own private death squad:  John Walker (Wyatt Russell), the disgraced Captain America replacement, Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), who can barely stay on this plane of existence without technological help, and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), the tragic Red Room experiment.  While arguing over how to escape, they also discover Bob (Lewis Pullman), who has apparently been stuck in the facility for however long.  Turns out Valentina had a plan for a new post-Avengers world by creating her own superhero, Sentry, and Bob was the only test subject that survived.  Barely limping away from the trap, the misfit antiheroes are "rescued" by Alexei, the Red Guardian (David Harbour), and then almost immediately captured by freshman congressman and permanently tired dude Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan).  Bucky has been trying to get Valentina removed from her position but the wheels of justice are moving a little slowly.  And his resources consist of a team of fuck-ups and war criminals and an inside source with a wavering conscience.  But hey, everybody's got problems.  Especially when Valentina's control over Bob isn't as strong as she thought.

Marvel has been on a decline in popularity but this was a solid entry and I'm a little sad it's not getting the levels of praise it would have in a pre-Endgame world.  I get it.  It's hard to build a replacement team after your all-stars but --Oh holy shit, have I just discovered why sports people are they way they are??  Oh no.  I...have to go re-evaluate some things in my life...

Currently, it's only available for rent, but it's dropping on Disney+ Aug 27.