Thunderbolts*

Director Jack Schreier's Thunderbolts*, the film's screenplay credited to Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, briefly hits its stride when the team of discarded henchmen find themselves trapped in the memories of Lewis Pullman's Bob, a depressive amnesiac who has been experimented on by whichever secret society is currently propping up the Marvel universe's version of the United States. Rather than the conscious vivisection haunting Wolverine over in Fox's defunct X-Men series, Bob's hang-ups centre around a family home so abusive that the decorum demanded by a PG-13 rating means the film is compelled to interrupt Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Valentina before she can describe something truly horrid when debriefing her shadow-casting creation. Once the title troupe have trespassed on these intrusive thoughts though, stray elbows are allowed to be thrown at and connect with the rotten paterfamilias battering his wife and child with fists and invective. Perhaps this moment sings because the presence of Florence Pugh's Yelena instantly organises Thunderbolts* as something of a sequel to Black Widow, a film packed with morally destitute fathers? A shame then that Yelena's own deadbeat Dad, David Harbour's Red Guardian, hangs around proceedings like a bad stink. Any lingering goodwill for this swollen super-soldier, presumably, having more to do with Harbour's overprotective turn on Netflix's Stranger Things than the character abandoning his adoptive daughters to a child trafficking ring in a previous instalment.