Thunderbolt review: ‘not even Florence Pugh can fire this up’

Not even Florence Pugh can quite save Marvel from the sense of a franchise in terminal decline. But she may have arrested its freefall. As Yelena Belova – sister to of Scarlett Johansson’s late Black Widow – Pugh embodies the current way of thinking about superheroes – that they are at heart super vulnerable to bouts of super depression.

Certainly the rag-tag, stained-suit bunch who all reluctantly become part of a heroic team are each schlepping their own psychosis formed as lone warriors. They coalesce like random magnets to form a unit against Julia Louis Dreyfus’s US spy agency supremo Valentina Allegra de Fontaine who, being investigated by Wendell Pierce’s congressman, attempts to wipe out evidence of a secret programme that failed to weaponise human potential.

This involves killing the humans she experimented on. One survives – a chap called Bob (Lewis Pullman) – which just goes to show that the experiments were not a failure after all. Bob is also on a bit of a psychological downer. When his powers are realised he has a god-like ability to destroy life and a gargantuan capacity for being morose not seen in fiction since Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh.

Sebastian Stan and David Harbour[Missing Credit]

Realising the threat Yelena joins forces with her highly dysfunctional dad, the vodka-quaffing former Russian superhero Red Guardian (David Harbour) whose sense of right and wrong, one wonders, might set him against a fictional Russian tyrant. At any rate he wants heroes to be heroes again, sentimental fool.

Sebastian Stan (who played Trump in The Apprentice) plays the Winter Soldier whose attempt to live civilian life in congress just doesn’t suit his itching penchant for riding motorbikes and using his motorised arm to rip off doors.

The action sequences are top notch. Falling masonry from buildings provides thrilling opportunity for the gang to save little girls and blameless citizens. Yet the film is still an unwitting admission that the glory days of the superhero are over. Or so it seemed before the trailer for the forthcoming Fantastic Four movie appeared like reminder of optimism from another era.

Thunderbolts

★★★