In an effort to spend time with my teen son, I took him to see Thunderbolts, a film I had zero interest in seeing. I’m not a superhero film fan and I don’t especially like action movies. (I'm a 50-something woman, okay, I'd rather watch drama in the South of France for two hours.) But during this Marvel movie, I was electrified by the fast pace, action sequences and Florence Pugh's acting chops. I was also completely shocked by what the film reveals about the inner life of its target audience of teens and young men—reflected on screen by a new villain who is completely unlike any movie bad guy I’ve ever encountered before. Here’s why it’s been a real eye-opener for me, and in my opinion is required viewing for parents.
As a Teen Boy Mom, I Got a Real Surprise Watching Thunderbolts*
I expected fluff, but got insight
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Published May 14, 2025
Photo by Chuck Zlotnick/Photo by Chuck Zlotnick - © 2025 MARVEL. All Rights Reserved.
A quick recap of the story: We meet Yelena (Florence Pugh), a superhero-for-hire who’s bored with mercenary work. She is suicidally depressed, but decides to live after stopping by to see her estranged father, a retired superhero played by David Harbour. Yelena agrees to do one last government-ordered mission before quitting the merc biz forever. But when she’s sent to a top-secret experimental facility to kill a rogue agent, she meets a handful of other middle-rung superheros that have been sent to kill her, and each other. And everyone meets “Bob,” a shy guy who has survived the illegal experiments at the place and now just wants to escape…but is Bob all he seems?
Okay, so….a bunch of underdog good guys struggle against a wicked government official who seeks to control a lab-created bad guy as an evil-doing pawn? That’s about as groundbreaking as florals for spring. (Suicide Squad and Guardians of the Galaxy have covered similar ground.) What’s different here is the psychological makeup and destructive weapon of the main bad guy, Bob (aka Void in his transformed persona). He’s a character who personifies depression, hopelessness and isolation. (I’m not reaching to describe him this way—the director backs this up.) Bob grew more powerful the more hopelessness he verbalized, and I thought about how this villain was something new on the mass cultural landscape. I grew nostalgic for the more upbeat bad guys of yesteryear, like in Superman, when Lex Luthor wanted to take over the world. Or in the Batman saga, remember how Joker and Penguin wanted to commit crimes for profit, power or even for just for the bubbly, insanity-fueled fun of it?
© 2025 MARVEL. All Rights Reserved.
Mid-movie, I glanced over at my son, expecting him to share my incredulity with Bob’s whole bummer vibe. My teenager’s a sophisticated filmgoer who, for example, insisted we see Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed flop Megalopolis at the theater and reads me Letterboxd reviews. However my budding Roger Ebert not only didn’t meet my gaze, he was entirely transfixed by Void, who was by now on screen turning civilians into inky sidewalk stains.
And I realized—of course my kid doesn’t think it’s odd that an angry depressed guy is the evildoer here, since that’s been the throughline of his young life. The Centers for Disease Control reports that suicide is the third most common cause of death among middle and high school youth, and overall, for the age group of 10 to 24, suicide is the second leading cause of death. A violent boy child was the centerpiece of the most talked-about show on Netflix this spring. IRL, brain rot makes it hard to think clearly. The New York Times reports that boys are falling behind scholastically and are slow to get jobs and romantic partners these days. And shrinks who study boys and male teens, like NYU Professor Niobe Way, offer up case study after case study depicting isolation. She told the Harvard EdCast,“I realized that what they [teen boys] were talking about with their crisis of connection as they got older in a culture that thought friendships was feminine, they gave friendships a gender and a sexuality, which doesn't make any sense because all humans need friendships. That actually, it wasn't just a struggle that boys were having. It was a struggle that all of us are having to stay connected to our soft sides and our desire for deep, intimate friendships with each other, regardless of gender identities,” she said.
Light spoiler here: the film’s got a bittersweet ending thanks to the efforts of the plucky Thunderbolts, and especially Florence Pugh’s charismatic Yelena. Everyone connects with Bob and even assists him, even as he’s trying to turn them into voided ink blots. The resolution of the plot was not only a satisfying movie conclusion for me (and my son as well he told me after), but also offered me a far-off thunderclap of hope for today’s youth. Maybe all the boys out there buying tickets will get the message that even if you’ve had big troubles and made mistakes (Bob is revealed to have suffered from addiction and mental illness before he submitted to ill-fated government experiments), you have hope. And that hope comes via connection and collaboration and yes, friendship, instead of leaning into the dark cloud of negativity and “stuffing the bad feelings down” as Yelena puts it.
Our boys know what it’s like to be sad, alone and to have hopelessness seem like a viable option; I’m glad seeing Thunderbolts*, I was reminded of how, for many kids, surviving in these post-Covid days of popcorn-brain and endless controversy is a superhero victory in itself.
