‘Thunderbolts*’ is a refreshing misfit hit after many Marvel misfires

Marvel’s latest team-building exercise, Thunderbolts* — the asterisk is part of its title for reasons I’ll leave you to discover — is a decently effective blend of misfit mercenaries and pop psychology. After a series of Marvel Cinematic Universe misfires, that’s at the very least, a relief.

It begins with Yelena, who we met a few years back as Black Widow’s spiritual sibling, decidedly down in the depths. Or rather, as a Cole Porter lyric would have it, “down in the depths on the 90th floor.”

She stands on the roof of a skyscraper, looking glum and musing that there’s something wrong with her … “an emptiness, a void.”

Then she steps off the edge, plummeting clearly to her death since she doesn’t fly.

Then, a billow of black fabric appears.

“Or maybe I’m just bored,” she muses, and skydives down to her latest assignment — something to do with destroying a lab in Malaysia. It does bore her, even when things go right.

Yelena, played with downbeat charisma by Florence Pugh, is just not feeling fulfilled. And neither are the mostly unsuperhero types she’ll soon be tangling with in a life-or-death battle. Even diehard Marvel fans may not recognize them right away — Ghost (Hannah John Kamen), who can dematerialize to get herself out of jams; Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), who’s a very good mimic; John Walker (Wyatt Russell), who is, as Yelena puts it, a “dime store Captain America;” and a dazed and confused lab patient (Lewis Pullman) named Bob. (Gotta say I found him instantly relatable; not sure why.)

All of these folks were damaged by childhood trauma — a fact that will be central to what follows — but that doesn’t mean they can’t put two and two together. They deduce that they were all sent to what amounts to a deathtrap, and once they figure out who sent them, they head straight — well, with a lot of colorful detours — for the office of the impeached-but-unrepentant CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who’s played with delighted condescension by Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

“You’re all so adorable,” she says. “Just think, I send you down there to kill each other, and instead you make nice and you form a team.”

The forming is what the movie’s about. Bob, I’m pleased to say, turns out to have a lot to do with her nefarious schemes. Along for the ride is Yelena’s dad (David Harbour, very funny), who is both a limo driver and the self-styled Red Guardian.

Another old pal shows up who is Captain America-adjacent: Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Winter Soldier-turned-freshman-Congressman. He is, as Harbour notes at one point, “very cool.”

Cool, but also damaged in a film that takes bruised psyches as seriously as it does slow-motion bullet trajectories. That may seem odd for a superhero epic, but director Jake Schreier, best known for the Netflix road-rage series Beef, makes sense of it. He and his team have built Thunderbolts* around pyrotechnics that are digital but also emotional.

For all the time they spend dodging slabs of exploding buildings and saving hapless New Yorkers, the characters remain stubbornly convinced that they’re not heroic, which is kind of refreshing, really.

“I’m just drifting,” laments Yelena. “I don’t have purpose.”

You could also say that about Marvel lately. And while it’s never wise to read too much into character-based navel-gazing, after three dozen MCU movies, this bit of self-awareness in Thunderbolts* is undeniably welcome.