Superhero fatigue has gotten so intense that even the protagonists are bored now.
Thunderbolts*, the 36th Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, kicks off with charismatic assassin Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) bemoaning how tedious her life has become. Through a beleaguered voiceover, she laments that she’s stuck in an unfulfilling rut of work, work, work. Sure, she’s a highly skilled mercenary whose work involves life-or-death confrontations. But amid all the espionage and murder, she’s lost her joie de vivre.
Looking bored, the fan favorite from Black Widow and Hawkeye flawlessly base jumps off a dizzyingly high skyscraper into a top-secret laboratory, where she slays a slew of minions with ease (in a clichéd hallway fight scene). We can assume director Jake Schreier intends this contradiction of hard-hitting action (with no blood, because PG-13) and Yelena’s blasé attitude to be funny. However, she might as well be speaking for those audience members who are exhausted by the same superhero movie beats being hit over and over again, with lessening impact through repetition. Like Yelena, some of us are numb to the violence and conspiracies because they’ve become routine.
Sadly, Yelena and her eponymous team of antiheroes won’t save us from this downward spiral. Instead, we get a mess of a movie that balances hijinks, heroics, and a half-hearted message about depression with all the grace of a black widow with eight broken legs.
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