Monday new releases: 5 May 2025

Thunderbolts* and Marlon Williams: Ngā Ao e Rua - Two Worlds are both in cinemas.

If the last couple of products I’ve seen are anything to go by, Marvel are going to some interesting and dark places which means there’s a bit of dissonance there in terms of traditional costumed capering on screen.

We watched Daredevil: Born Again on Disney+ because we’d recently seen the series Echo (set in the Choctaw nation and featuring a superhero, Alaqua Cox as Amaya Lopez, who was not only Native American but also deaf and with a prosthetic leg) and that series featured an appearance from Vincent D’Onofrio as the Kingpin, Wilson Fisk, attempting to repair the damage from a falling out with Lopez in which she shot him in the eye (!).

Anyway, this was my first exposure to D’Onofrio’s Kingpin and I found him compelling enough to justify committing to nine episodes of this new series and – hoo boy – was it bleak. And violent – very much grown-up television, despite its relationship to the family friendly MCU. To be honest, after going through similar brutality with Colin Farrell’s The Penguin over the Christmas holiday, we are keen to watch something a little more wholesome next.

But what’s interesting about Daredevil: Born Again – and why I bring it up in relation to the new Marvel feature Thunderbolts* – is the relationship between trauma and violence and how we can be brought up to believe that violence solves our problems and resolves our conflicts.

In Thunderbolts*, a ragtag assembly of cast-off superheroes and costumed mercenaries are thrown together when their boss tries to dispose of them all as part of a politically necessary clean-up operation. Florence Pugh is Yelena, an assassin and sister of the late Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). Wyatt Russell is John Walker, at one point going to be the new Captain America until he was found to be psychologically unsuited to the role. David Harbour has a lot of fun as Yelena’s father Alexei (aka Red Guardian), Sebastian Stan returns as Captain America’s best mate Bucky and there’s a character called Ghost (Hannah-John Kamen) who I don’t know anything about.

Escaping the plot to kill them hatched by Julia-Louis Dreyfuss’ shady C.I.A. chief Valentina de Fontaine, they rescue another misfit – Bob (Lewis Pullman), who was a victim of some misguided medical experiments and has some creepy powers as a result.

Noisily encouraged by Alexei to become a team – the nickname the Thunderbolts is not related to the character of “Thunderbolt” Ross who was played by Harrison Ford in the last Captain America picture but is instead much cuter but also much sadder – the group heads to New York where Bob will discover his destiny as a superhero called The Sentry and, not long after after, reveal that childhood trauma and adult bipolar disorder is not a good combination with god-like super powers.

What’s that phrase? “Stare into the void for long enough, eventually the void stares into you.”

The tonal shifts are bipolar in their own way. The road movie bickering among the gang is often pretty funny but this is a superhero film that finally acknowledges that you can’t punch your way out of trauma, and the deep wells of sadness that all the Thunderbolts have is made moving by real actors encouraged to do some real acting.