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.”