LOS ANGELES, April 29 (UPI) -- Seventeen years into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it is perhaps a bit late to complain about repetition and diminishing returns. Thunderbolts*, however, is an egregious retread of previous Avengers movies to much lesser effect.
Florence Pugh returns to star as Yelena, sister to the late Black Widow, who is tired of being an assassin for hire. She accepts one last job for CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), the reward for which would be a promotion to a public-facing superhero.
On that job, Yelena battles disgraced Captain America John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ant-Man's rogue quantum agent Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and the new mysterious character Bob (Lewis Pullman). The quartet reluctantly team up to figure out why Valentina sent them all to the same place to eliminate each other.
Thunderbolts*, in theaters Friday, plays the exact same beats as 2012's The Avengers, and really any archetypal buddy movie. The characters hate each other at first but begrudgingly begin to see each other's value and become partners.
This formula falls flat among the Thunderbolts because the characters are not as distinct and vivid as Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and the Hulk. Those A-list superheroes have legendary personalities that are naturally at odds with each other.
Contrarily, the Thunderbolts' bickering isn't amusing when they have to explain all the characters' differences. Characters call out Walker for committing murder (which occurred in the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier), and Yelena and Ghost explain the ways in which they were trained as young assassins.
None of these characters have even starred in their own movie. As supporting characters from previous entries, there's not a strong sense of their identities to bring together and the film barely develops them any further.
Most of their jokes about Dr. Phil and Uber beg for cultural relevance. The idea of Walker as a rude poser of a Captain America, getting shut down for mansplaining to Ghost and Yelena, is amusing but not enough to sustain the film.
Bob is endearing as an amnesiac who doesn't know how he got there or what his powers are. Yelena's father, Red Guardian (David Harbour), comes to their aid too and his schtick is screaming a lot.
Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), aka the Winter Soldier, who is now a first term congressman, gets to show up with cool action hero moves wearing leather and sunglasses.
Several of the action scenes prove to be pointless when they're undercut upon their conclusion. For example, the Thunderbolts fight their way into a place where it turns out they would have been invited. In another scene, they are rescued only to be immediately captured.
At one point, the entire team bands together to flip over a falling slab of pavement. Once the innocent bystanders are out of the way, who cares which side of the street it lands on? It is an utterly meaningless group effort.
Like many villains, Valentina creates a monster she can no longer control. This one has powers derivative of both Neo in The Matrix and Thanos in the Avengers movies. Though Thunderbolts* visualizes them a little differently, it's the same concept.
At least Thunderbolts* filmed on sets or locations in Utah, New York City, Malaysia and Georgia. So it looks more tangible than movies where actors stand in front of screens, but the Thunderbolts' New York battle is lackluster compared to the Avengers'.
The film also has a very superficial take on trauma and depression. It gets off to a promising start as Yelena's malaise gives her first fight scene interesting energy, because she can't help being efficient despite her disaffected expression.
Bob's power involves forcing characters to flash back to their greatest shames, previously seen in films as diverse as Flatliners and Star Trek V. This movie has little time to develop those shames, so complex traumas are reduced to regrets over killing, abuse or neglect.
The message is that community is healthier than isolation, which is well-intentioned but again, overly simplistic. The film struggles to justify uniting these characters, so it is superficial to make them a team after arguing the entire movie.
The funniest bit in Thunderbolts* would be a spoiler, but just know that Bob's most random backstory pays off. The end credits are also filled with funny jokes about common fan complaints, but the movie itself needed more of a point of view about these characters going through the same motions as Marvel's most famous heroes.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
