THUNDERBOLTS*

Here's the honest read. THUNDERBOLTS* has more heart than most team-up movies — a genuinely funny, genuinely moving arc between Yelena and her estranged father, and an ending that reaches, however imperfectly, for something like the Gospel of John's language about light overcoming darkness. There's real craft in the character work and the humor lands.

But the movie earns its extreme-caution rating. The dialogue is loaded with gratuitous obscenities and profanities, including several uses of Christ's name and two GD profanities — language the story never needed. The action turns intense in places, and the third act introduces a twist that leaves the plot confusing and only partly explained.

So: if you're an adult who can watch past the language to the redemptive story underneath, this one's worth your time. If you're deciding for children or young teens, this isn't the Marvel movie for them.

Yelena Belova, the adopted sister of the late Black Widow, has grown disillusioned working black ops for a manipulative CIA director. When that director lures Yelena and several other agents into what looks like a deadly trap, they discover they've been set against one another — and stumble onto a mysterious young man named Bob, who claims to have amnesia. As Yelena and the others fight to escape, one question follows them out the door: why does the director want Bob so badly?

Three stars means solid, uneven, and worth seeing anyway — and that's this movie. David Harbour is genuinely hilarious as Yelena's estranged father, and the banter between him and Florence Pugh builds to a reconciliation scene that lands with real feeling. The opening stretch runs a little slow, but it earns that payoff.

The trouble starts in the third act. A twist involving Bob's true nature sets up a strong, high-stakes confrontation — but it opens the door to further twists that leave the ending confusing rather than satisfying. A late, mysterious new character (drawn from the comics) will leave viewers unfamiliar with the source material genuinely lost. The result is a film with more heart than polish: funny, touching, and a little adrift by the finish.

This is a movie reaching, imperfectly, for something biblical. Its clearest strength is a story about flawed people risking themselves for one another — a sacrificial, symbolic death born of selfless love, and a daughter reconciling with the father she'd shut out. There's also a patriotic thread about serving one's country and one's neighbors, though it's complicated by heroes who choose to withhold the full truth from the public at the end.

The film's central image — light overcoming darkness, defeating evil, and bringing life — echoes the Gospel of John almost directly. But the echo is incomplete. Because the movie never names God or Jesus, its light-versus-darkness imagery risks reading as vague spiritual metaphor rather than the specific, personal Light the Gospel proclaims — closer to a borrowed Platonic idea of light than to the real thing.

Scripture already says what this film is straining toward: "In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it" (John 1:4–5). THUNDERBOLTS* gives you the shape of that hope without the name behind it — which makes it a good conversation starter, not a substitute for the real story.

THUNDERBOLTS* has more soul than you'd expect from a superhero team-up — a real father-daughter arc, real laughs, and an ending that, however messily, reaches for the language of light overcoming darkness. It also has language and intensity that make it a poor fit for kids or young teens. Same answer as we opened with: worth the trip — adults only. Choosing for the whole family instead? Start with our latest.