For “Thunderbolts*,” Marvel has thrown so much stuff into its new branding event — an enigmatic asterisk, a guinea pig, a comic villain, a depressed superhero, nepo babies, veterans of David Simon’s “The Wire” — that some of it was bound to stick. The results are fitfully amusing, sometimes touching and resolutely formulaic. The story zigs and zags between firing guns and dropping bodies, and its tone zips all over the place. What holds it more or less together is a cast that includes Florence Pugh getting her Tom Cruise on, David Harbour playing a boisterous Russian clown and Sebastian Stan winking at Donald J. Trump.
Stan, whose last splashy turn was as the young Trump in the biopic “The Apprentice,” is back as Bucky Barnes, who you may know as the Winter Soldier. This movie’s resident cool dude, Bucky is a soulful warrior with a prosthetic metal arm who looks good on a motorcycle and is mostly here to provide franchise continuity. Now in Congress, Bucky is working with Wendell Pierce’s Congressman Gary, to bring down the head of the C.I.A., Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Drefyus, another Marvel returnee). She’s been overseeing a secret program out of a mountain lair worthy of a Bond villain, so, yep, she’s bad news.
If you’re not a comic-book devotee and have never heard of the Thunderbolts before they were exhumed for screen service, you aren’t alone. First introduced on the page in 1997, the group has been re-suited up here to be testy, quarrelsome and finally likable antiheroes, redeemable rogues with hard-luck stories and blood-slicked hands. (The body count is high; the gore sanitized.) The most reliably entertaining are the dryly sardonic Yelena Belova (Pugh) and the excitable, histrionic Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (a showily outsized Harbour). The sister and father of Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, they are Soviet-trained toughs so powerful they upstaged that superhero in her titular 2021 flick.
There’s always a lot going on in Marvel movies, and the filmmakers here — the screenwriters are Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, the director is Jack Schreier — pile on twisty plot turns, blowouts, intimate chats and yet more characters. Chris Bauer, a familiar face from “The Wire,” plays a security type, Holt, while Lewis Pullman plays a mysterious newbie, Bob, an addition who isn’t interesting enough for all the screen time he’s given. (His father is the actor Bill Pullman.) Other returning faces include Wyatt Russell (his folks are Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell), who has some notably bleak moments as John Walker. Like Hannah John-Kamen’s Ava Starr/Ghost and the rest, he mostly plays backup for Pugh.
This is Pugh’s movie from the start, and that’s a good thing. She’s a vibrantly alive presence, which is useful given that death is so pervasive in Marvel movieland, where heroes, villains and a seemingly infinite number of nameless civilians die — though some irrepressibly, near-miraculously rise again — amid the high jinks and wisecracks. Here, death enters early with Yelena having what seems like a to-be-or-not crisis atop a skyscraper. Speaking in weary, Russian-accented English, her face slightly pinched and the corners of her lips turned down, Yelena is in rough shape. “There’s something wrong with me, an emptiness,” she says as she steps off the ledge and plunges into the void, adding: “Or maybe I’m just bored.”
Pugh’s deadpan delivery is disarming, as is the revelation that she did the stunt herself, which involved stepping off the top of the second-tallest building in the world before her character deploys a parachute. There’s no way to tell it’s Pugh from the way the filmmakers handle the scene because, after Yelena steps off, there’s a cut to a long shot of a tiny figure falling next to the tower. I assumed the whole thing was done with CGI and a stunt double. When Tom Cruise scrambled atop the world’s tallest building in “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” (2011), you knew it was him from the attentive way the scene was staged and shot, which created a visceral sense of peril and further burnished his stardom. If actors risk their lives in a movie as Pugh did, viewers should know it; I only do because of a behind-the-scenes video.
The other action sequences are hit or miss, and tend to run on too long with the usual mix of objects — bodies, bullets, rolling vehicles, chunks of concrete — frenetically ping-ponging inside the frame. Schreier does far better when he closes in on the actors, who are generally nice and loose with one another, and on occasion even find room to settle into an agreeable, persuasive groove. That suits the group’s point and purpose, which is to join heroic forces. Its truer mission, though, is to help fill the void left by the deaths of the superheroes in “Avengers: Infinity War” and by Robert Downey Jr. (who played Tony Stark/Iron Man) and Chris Evans (Steve Rogers/Captain America), who have hung up their avenging uniforms.
If the Thunderbolts never cohere as a unit, it’s in part because they’re neither as iconic as the Avengers nor as charmingly offbeat as the Guardians of the Galaxy at their best. The larger problem is that the movie doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be, so it tries to be too many clashing things. By the end, the Thunderbolts might not look as baffled as they do in some of the movie’s posters, but a question mark — do they have the box-office muscle and appeal? — hangs over them along with that cutesy asterisk. The only sure thing is that Pugh deepens the material, investing Yelena with real feeling and a lightly detached ironic sensibility that’s reminiscent of Downey’s Stark. Pugh is the best thing to happen to Marvel in a while. I just hope that she doesn’t stay in its world too long; she already knows how to soar.
Thunderbolts*
Rated PG-13 for comic-book movie violence. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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