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.