Florence Pugh is so terrific in Thunderbolts* that she carries an entire Marvel movie on her shoulders. She manages this throughout the otherwise largely cumbersome Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) proceedings all while making you laugh at her dark dry wit and delight in her tough, no-nonsense fighting skills. You believe in her nearly suicidal depression and even tear up a bit at her most poignant moment in the film. That’s when her character Yelena Belova’s normally stoic front breaks and she says to her estranged father:
Daddy, I’m so alone. I don’t have anything anymore. All I do is sit, and look at my phone, and think of all the terrible things I’ve done; and then I go to work, and then I drink, come home to no one, then I sit and think of all the terrible things I’ve done again.
I couldn’t believe she pulled it off, that first potentially cringeworthy line. Thereafter the speech is terrific. But that first line, I don’t know who else could’ve delivered it with such a perfectly timed little crack in her voice at the reversion to the childlike word “daddy.”
If you’re interested in the craft of acting, go see Thunderbolts* if only to wonder at the kind of skill that can ground the MCU in such emotional realism. Pugh even looks like a real person, making her harshly chopped hair and utilitarian jumpsuit seem genuinely her own.
Most Marvel actors can’t do what Pugh does here. For comparison, just look at Sebastian Stan (The Apprentice, Pam & Tommy), an actor I generally admire for his charisma and bold inventiveness. But here, he appears to be stumped once again by his glum Bucky Barnes aka Winter Soldier character. Perhaps paralyzed by embarrassment, Stan adopts a series of sullen tough-guy poses that have zero conviction, letting his leather jacket and motorcycle and shaggy hairdo stand for whatever the Winter Soldier is supposed to be.
David Harbour (Stranger Things) is good though, genuinely funny and touching,…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
