Marvel summons semi-super powered B team for Thunderbolts*

In recent outings there was barely room for a plot, there were so many character entrances and exits.

With Thunderbolts* there’s a feeling of getting back to basics, which is no bad thing.

The cast members are more vaguely familiar rather than iconic – a collection of also-ran semi-villains and not quite heroes from the more forgettable corners of the Universe, led by Black Widow’s kid sister Yelena, played by Florence Pugh.

Related stories:

Yelena is having a mid-career crisis, picking up bits of CIA odd-job assassinations, jumping off tall buildings - that sort of thing.

She’s summoned by shadowy Government fixer Valentina Allegra de Fontaine – Val for short – to take out another enemy agent. Only to find herself up against some semi-familiar faces.

These include people like Ghost, the Taskmaster and US Agent – I know, never heard of any of them. Plus someone called Bob, who even they’ve never heard of.

But obscurity has one advantage in Thunderbolts*. They arrive with minimum baggage, so we’re not snowed under by more multiverse, alternative-timeline stuff.

In fact, as Val points out in the film, the whole Avengers thing is pretty much over, so let’s start again.

Starting again in this context invariably means scientific meddling, which never bodes well. A blend of robotics, AI and genetic engineering leads to a sinister caped crusader called The Sentry, with absolute powers. And you know what they say about absolute power corrupting.

So, we need some superheroes, fast. And if not exactly super – Yelena’s crew are more enhanced than all-powerful – then just heroes will do.

Though their patchy track-records rather disqualify from that title too. But right now, Bucky Barnes will take who he can get.

The minimum amount of research will remind you who Bucky is – Captain America’s old sidekick, later a Soviet super-spy, recently an American Congressman, currently retired. Anyway, he seems to have taken charge of the motley crew.

There’s one missing ingredient – Yelena’s goofy adoptive father Alexei, over-played to the max by the gigantic David Harbour.

I suspect the more superhero-fatigued of you may be packing up and heading for the exit about now.

All these characters – the sort of Dirty Half-Dozen that comic-book movies cobble together when they can’t think of anything new – why should we bother?

But it’s surprisingly entertaining, not least because the powers of the so-called Thunderbolts – the asterisk at the end of the title implies that their name is still a work in progress – are not exactly over-powering.

Nobody flies, nobody has Godlike strength or amazing armour with extra gadgets.

When a big concrete wall threatens to fall on a child, it takes three or four of them to hold it up. That’s the sort of semi-superpower we feel comfortable with.

And by the end, the old lesson applies – the new team can do things together they couldn’t do alone.

One day I’d love to see a superhero film where team members keep crashing into each other. And it’s not until everyone gets out of the way of the one capable person that anything gets done. Too many cooks spoil the broth, in other words.

That may happen in Marvel’s 46th movie, but until then Thunderbolts* will stick to the traditional formula - and to its credit it's is certainly more fun than its gigantic, more pretentious predecessors.