Thunderbolts* (12A, 126 mins)

Verdict: Pull up a Pugh

FOUR STARS 

For an actress not yet 30, Florence Pugh has a thrillingly varied set of credits. An abused Victorian wife (Lady Macbeth, 2016), a wrestler (Fighting With My Family, 2019), a nuclear physicist’s psychiatrist lover (Oppenheimer, 2023) and a princess 20,000 years into the future, in last year’s Dune: Part Two, are just a handful of her glittering performances.

She was wonderful, too, as Amy, the bolshiest of the March sisters, in 2019’s delightful Little Women.

But it’s as a super-charged Russian-born ᴀssᴀssin that she might yet have her biggest impact, because if there’s a single character that can drag the faltering Marvel Cinematic Universe out of its creative and commercial slump, it is Pugh’s Yelena Belova. 

That’s a mighty challenge, but she’s the propulsive force that could just make a hit of Thunderbolts*.

Pugh made her MCU debut four years ago in Black Widow, with Yelena serving as a kind of comic foil to Scarlett Johansson’s more po-faced Natasha Romanoff, her older sister.

But in Thunderbolts* she takes centre stage and quickly establishes herself as one of Marvel’s more compelling characters: a young, world-weary hitwoman who hates herself for spending hours scrolling through her phone. 

For an actress not yet 30, Florence Pugh has a thrillingly varied set of credits, but it’s as a super-charged Russian-born ᴀssᴀssin that she might yet have her biggest impact

She’s the propulsive force that could just make a hit of Thunderbolts* (pictured with Sebastian Stan, Hannah John-Kamen, Wyatt Russell and David Harbour)

Now, the prospect of yet another superhero blockbuster might not flood your heart and mind with joy. You might well roll your eyes — both at those who continue to churn out these movies, and those still in thrall to them. 

If so, then spare a thought for me, because I have to see all of them. I feel (and more often than not share) your cynicism.

But Thunderbolts* and even its whimsical asterisk soon won me over, mostly because of Pugh.

Her double-act with David Harbour as her semi-estranged, proxy father Alexei Shostakov is a genuine hoot.

Formerly known as Red Guardian, the hairy Russian super-soldier with a mouthful of gold teeth, he is now wistfully retired and running a limousine company.

On seeing the depressive Yelena for the first time in a year, Shostakov grunts: ‘The light inside you is dim… even by Eastern European standards.’ I chuckled aloud.

Yelena’s state of mind isn’t just played for laughs, however. Memories of childhood trauma and mental health frailties have a significant role in this tale, which in lesser hands might have seemed glib, distasteful even.

Fortunately, director Jake Shreier and writers Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, along with the cast, are firmly up to the task.

In Thunderbolts* she takes centre stage and quickly establishes herself as one of Marvel’s more compelling characters: a young, world-weary hitwoman

Her double-act with David Harbour (left) as her semi-estranged, proxy father Alexei Shostakov is a genuine hoot

As for the story itself, its chief villain is the exotically-named CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (the ever excellent Julia Louis-Dreyfus, playing a ramped-up version of conniving Selina Meyer in the TV satire Veep), whose eager ᴀssistant Mel (Geraldine Viswanathan) becomes increasingly concerned about her boss’s evil chicanery.

Facing an impeachment trial and determined to get rid of anyone who might testify against her, Valentina lays a trap for the motley crew she used to send out to do her dirty work, who also include the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), would-be Captain America John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen).

Her fiendish plan is to set this bunch of cut-price Avengers, the self-styled Thunderbolts, against each other. But instead they join forces, which would probably be enough to out-muscle her except that she has an extra card up her sleeve which I shouldn’t disclose here, except to reveal that it has something to do with Bob (Lewis Pullman), the diffident victim of a genetic-engineering experiment.

Needless to add, this is all super-silly. But it is done with terrific brio, leading to the all but inevitable showdown in Manhattan in which innocent mortals and even tall buildings are reduced to inert shadows.

Trying to squeeze comedy out of the superhero genre, as in the Guardians Of The Galaxy and ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool films, can sometimes seem just as strained as loading them with solemn, weighty themes that we’re expected to take seriously.

Thunderbolts* deftly combines both. I liked it much more than I expected to, but never mind that asterisk. It should really come with a question-mark. Can it zap the box office? We will soon see.