Marvel takes a breather with its substitute team

In a scene from Thunderbolts* Red Guardian (David Harbour) fantasizes aloud about one day creating figurines of his newly formed anti-hero group. But his daughter, the spy and murderer with a guilty conscience, Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), silences him: "I'm not a marketing tool!" The exchange summarizes the usual tension between Marvel's corporate strategy and the efforts of some of its creators to give the studio's films soul and personality. The good news is that Thunderbolts* is that, unlike some of the studio's latest products, it doesn't seem to be directed by an AI: Jake Schreier (A friend for Frank) does not have a curriculum to write home about, but he manages to provide consistency and poise to the adventure of these second-rate antiheroes and reformed villains, a narrative of overcoming and redemption that superhero cinema has been milking hard in recent years thanks to James Gunn and his Guardians of the Galaxy or theSuicide Squad.

It is a little surprising how reluctantly Sebastian Stan plays –for the tenth time between films and series– Bucky Barnes, less central than expected from the franchise's most veteran actor; the dramatic weight of the film ends up in the hands of a much more motivated and charismatic Florence Pugh. She and the mysterious Bob (Lewis Pullman) are the highlights of a Thunderbolts that only take their name from the comics they are inspired by. Or perhaps not even that, as the asterisk in the title already suggests, because if the final surprise of the first comic of Thunderbolts was that this new supergroup was formed by a group of villains posing as heroes, at the end of Thunderbolts* We discover that, despite the desire to have its own identity, the film continues to subordinate its existence to turning the next installment ofThe Avengers at an event.