OnScreen Review: "Black Widow"
Ken Jones, Chief Film Critic
Marvel Studios has gone to great lengths to give just about every Avenger their own movie or their own spin-off series; even Loki is in the midst of his own limited series on Disney+. Outside of Tony Stark and The Hulk, no one has been around the MCU as long as Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff. There has been talk for many years about a potential Black Widow film, it was just a matter of finding the right story and the right timing. Despite the logical window having passed given the conclusion of Avengers: Endgame, Marvel has apparently decided that now is the right time for Black Widow.
A flashback opens the film in 1995, as we condensed version of FX’s The Americans play out as Russian spies disguised as a middle-American nuclear family escapes the country. Natasha is the oldest daughter in this fake family. Jumping forward 21 years, the film is set in between the events of Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War, Natasha (Johansson) is on the run from S.H.I.E.L.D. after breaking the Sokovia Accords. A package from her “sister” Yelena (Florence Pugh) brings her back to her Russian roots, forcing her to reunite with her sister as well as their “parents” Alexei (David Harbour) and Melina (Rachel Weisz) as she tries to reach someone she thought she had killed, Draykov (Ray Winstone), the man behind the Black Widow program.
While they didn’t go with a origin story for Natasha, the film focuses a lot on her past; not just with the Black Widow program and the Red Room, but also the family dynamic between her, Yelena, Alexei, and Melina. The rapport between Natasha and Yelena is easily the best aspect of the movie and the most enjoyable. Along with Harbour and Weisz, they nail the dysfunctional family dynamic. Pugh is a fantastic actress and getting her to be in the MCU feels like it could be as big of a coup as when the X-Men franchise was able to snag Jennifer Lawrence a decade ago. One can easily envision a world where she is racking up Academy Award nominations for the roles she is taking on outside of the MCU, and everyone benefiting from it and making her a bigger star. Yelena has as sardonic detachment from things as they happen, more than once commenting on whether the circumstance she finds herself in would be a good way to die or not.
It is not just that they were pretending to be sisters as children, which is the closest thing either of them had to a real family and having that ripped away from them, but there is also the shared trauma of the Black Widow program that they went through and the forced sterilization that the young women in that endure. There is also some tension because Natasha got out and never really considered doing anything to help the woman who was once her sister.
Harbour and Weisz give some added family comic relief and drama as the surrogate parents, with Harbour acting like a giant oaf mostly for laughs, but both of them get some quieter moments of personal kindness with their daughters. The movie is really at its best when it focuses on the family dynamics and the fallout of the lives they have chosen/the lives that were chosen for them. Like the Fast & Furious franchise, it is all about family here.
The other aspects of the movie are not as strong as the family stuff, which makes the movie more of a mixed bag. Draykov is completely generic as the shadowy villain, and his threat, which literally includes the control of women’s bodies, is the MCU’s ham-fisted way of making Black Widow empowering for women. It is a total waste of Ray Wistone’s talents.
The action is also handled competently, including the hand-to-hand combat scenes, but it all has a generic feel to it, and has been done better more recently in movies like Atomic Blonde, which very clearly beat Black Widow to the punch. In fact, the comparisons of Black Widow to Atomic Blonde or Red Sparrow are almost unavoidable, and it compares more favorably to the latter than the former. And the final act feels like an extended reprise of the endings for Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Avengers: Age of Ultron). Even if the action is (thankfully) clear to follow, despite falling debris and chaos all unfolding all around the characters, it is not bringing anything new to the table in terms of big, eye-popping action or in the hand-to-hand combat.
It would have made a lot more sense to have actually released Black Widow between Civil War and Infinity War. Given the story arc of the character in Endgame, this feels like the period has been turned into an ellipsis now. Fair or not, Black Widow as a character always felt like a second-class Avenger, and given the placement in the MCU, Black Widow as a movie feels like it has been tacked on. The time to pull the trigger on this movie was in 2016, when the movie was set; it is enjoyable enough now to entertain, but it still sadly feels like an afterthought and a missed opportunity for a character that never got her due.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
(Black Widow is currently in theaters and is available for $30 on Disney+ Premiere Access.)