Marvel’s losers-only spinoff ‘Thunderbolts*’ sets expectations low and meets them

Marvel’s jokey, moody and middling “Thunderbolts*” returns the blockbuster franchise to the geeks. Only audiences caught up with the Cinematic Universe’s 35 films (plus a dozen miniseries) will recognize every face in this new supergroup of misfits, each previously introduced in stories starring more famous heroes that have now taken their paychecks and gone home.

Directed by Jake Schreier (“Paper Towns”) from a script by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, it elevates the following supporting players: Yelena (Florence Pugh), Black Widow’s sarcastic Slavic sister, and her dejected dad Alexei (David Harbour); Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), the unstable science experiment of “Ant-Man and the Wasp”; John Walker (Wyatt Russell), a flawed soldier demoted from being Captain America; and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Captain America’s formerly brainwashed frenemy who is now a freshman member of Congress.

The film doesn’t offer any backstory, but the plot is simple enough that you get the idea. These oddball side characters have been rewarded with their own quest: a team-up against corrupt CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), who calls them “defective losers.” Valentina is trying to genetically modify human test subjects to create her own fighter dubbed the “Golden Guardian of Good.” (Yes, her ideal is white, male and blond.)

Marvel’s actual goal is to scuff up the brand with some punk-rock snark. The Thunderbolts, so named for Yelena’s childhood soccer team, are encouraged to curse and murder more than you’d expect in a PG-13 film. I tend to loathe the way these four-quadrant movies invent subhuman villains — robots, aliens, bug-things and the like — so that the good guys can bash their brains in without a moral tizzy. Turns out it’s hard to cheer for human carnage too. Here, Yelena, a dour Russian assassin, kills two seemingly decent dorky scientists in the first few minutes and quips, “You guys can never aim for s—.”

Art films would be rated R for less. But a sense of unseriousness shields “Thunderbolts*” like protective armor. It gets hearty laughs by flattening Russell’s Walker — a tragic Afghanistan veteran confused by the government’s inconsistency about when he’s allowed to kill — into a spoof of bossy, paternalistic privilege. For 17 years, Marvel movies have dominated the box office and this is the first one to feel truly teenaged. Messy, depressive and defiant, it even appears to have told the hair team to throw away their combs.

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Nov. 22, 2023

It’s mostly Pugh’s tale, a smart move as she delivers one of the better performances I’ve seen in a super suit. Technically, her sullen Yelena opens the film in a hoodie — call it detention-room chic. To set the tenor, she destroys an entire medical laboratory in Kuala Lumpur while bemoaning her ennui. “Maybe I’m just bored,” she sighs, parachuting off the top of a skyscraper.

Pugh, with her droll line readings and smudgy blue eyeliner, plays apathy better than anyone; she’s compelling even with all the passion drained from her body. Most of the movie is in drab, lint-ball tones that match Yelena’s mood. (“Your light inside is dim even by Eastern European standards,” her father tuts.) I’m not sure what percentage of her own stunts Pugh is actually executing, but it would fit the tone fine if she rolled her eyes at the camera and said she wasn’t doing any of them. Her niftiest fight sequence looks like abstract art: a stark black-and-white aerial pan of her shadow battling minions down a hallway. There will be a few other moments of visual awe — say, a limousine standing on its nose — but only that one shot aspires to beauty.

Dreyfus’ Valentina has popped up intermittently in the franchise over the years and now sports a swoop of white hair that makes her resemble Tulsi Gabbard. (Gabbard inadvertently returned the compliment, showing up to her confirmation hearing in a white suit that resembled teaser footage of Dreyfus, which Reddit users joked looked like a game of spot-the-difference.) A tough-talking, fear-stoking political animal who claims that she alone can declare who is a criminal, Valentina starts the film at her own impeachment hearing with her assistant (Geraldine Viswanathan) grimly tasked to destroy any negative evidence against her, including freelance mercenaries like Yelena. Meanwhile, Valentina’s inquisitor (Wendell Pierce) is smirky and ineffectual, gloating about his ability to write the perfect memo, while congressman Bucky tells reporters he’s “very concerned.” It’s debatable whether he’s doing a burlesque of Susan Collins or is simply out of his depth.

The events take place over two days and are fairly contained. The first half of the film finds our riffraff joining forces to escape Valentina’s death trap; the second is a parable about mental illness where the metaphors take command over the plot. Between jokes, there’s talk about trust and trauma. Sometimes the jokes are about trauma, as when Yelena tells a fragile ex-meth addict named Bob (Lewis Pullman) to handle his dark thoughts by shoving them all the way down, advice so gloomy she giggles. The movie feels more inspired by the nightmare fuel of after-school PSAs than it is by comic books, like in a neat sequence where the characters enter a maze-like chamber of their own miserable memories. It plays uncannily close to a knock-off of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” — there’s even a similar sign twirler — but it’s easy to imagine a kid out there who is moved by this literalization of fighting past your own despair.

Longtime Marvel fans will know Bob by his two other identities: the Sentry, a quasi-good guy, and the Void, a bleakness that takes him over in ways he describes like a bipolar episode. In his great and powerful doominess, he can destroy everything around him, smearing civilians into shadows as easily as a windshield defeats a moth. This is Hasbro nihilism, but it works because Pullman wears his strength loosely; he’s able to show us that a broken guy like Bob needs therapy more than the ability to throw a nuclear right hook.

There’s a plainness to the fights. As one character notes, none of the protagonists fly, they all just punch and shoot. But the banter is quick and Yelena and Alexei’s Russian accents are enjoyably hammy. “Thunderbolts*” barely wins only by its own playground rules. It mocks itself before we can, adding an asterisk to its title — a hint they’d rather call the movie something grander but don’t feel worthy. Really, the whole movie feels like an asterisk. Don’t expect too much of me, it says. We’re just killing time until next summer’s all-star “Avengers: Doomsday.”