Bored, jaded, tired, out of gas and facing the Void. The script for “Thunderbolts*” begs you to notice how its characters’ internal doubts serve as allusions to the sorry state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So: refunds for everyone who bought a ticket to “Eternals” or “The Marvels”? A public apology for “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”? 

No, just more of the smug, self-referential humor that sounds like screenwriters saying, “We know you all think we’re running low on imagination. Now here’s a movie about that!” The dramatis personae are a dismal phalanx of second-raters who correctly keep telling each other, and the audience, how lame they are. In an opening mass-slaying so perfunctory that director Jake Schreier might as well have simply put up a card reading “Generic fight scene,” Black Widow’s little sister Yelena (Florence Pugh) languidly narrates script directions: “You shoot, I dodge.” She and her cohorts are practically yawning with ennui. Screenwriters Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo don’t seem to grasp that yawns are contagious.