‘Thunderbolts*' Review: Marvel's Superheroic Shrug
Bored, jaded, tired, out of gas and facing the Void. The script for 'Thunderbolts*' begs you to notice how its characters' internal doubts serve as allusions to the sorry state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So: refunds for everyone who bought a ticket to 'Eternals' or 'The Marvels'? A public apology for 'Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania'?
No, just more of the smug, self-referential humor that sounds like screenwriters saying, 'We know you all think we're running low on imagination. Now here's a movie about that!' The dramatis personae are a dismal phalanx of second-raters who correctly keep telling each other, and the audience, how lame they are. In an opening mass-slaying so perfunctory that director Jake Schreier might as well have simply put up a card reading 'Generic fight scene,' Black Widow's little sister Yelena (Florence Pugh) languidly narrates script directions: 'You shoot, I dodge.' She and her cohorts are practically yawning with ennui. Screenwriters Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo don't seem to grasp that yawns are contagious.
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