Despite featured roles in multiple Marvel movies, most recently Avengers: Endgame, Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow has never really had the chance to shine, often playing second fiddle to more colorful comic book characters with bright costumes and fun superpowers.
Like Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye, who doesn’t show up in Black Widow but is often referenced setting up his own upcoming Disney+ series, Johansson’s grounded human character and her serious backstory has always been missing the sense of comic book fun given to other Marvel headliners: Iron Man’s caustic wit, Spider-Man’s youthful inexperience, Thor and Captain America’s fish-out-of-water comedy.
Instead, Black Widow is a no-nonsense professional, and Johansson excels in the role. But the MCU movies are not Salt or Red Sparrow, and her serious-minded character often takes a backseat while others are given the spotlight.
Black Widow, Johansson’s first solo adventure after eight previous turns as the character in supporting roles, would seem to change that. The film starts out as a serious spy movie, with a Russian espionage prologue and an Avengers-less Natasha Romanoff on the run from the U.S. government around the time of the events of Captain America: Civil War.
Ultimately, however, Johansson’s Natasha once again gets the shaft as more colorful supporting characters steal the movie right away from its lead. Black Widow represents a bitter sendoff for its central character, but it’s a more entertaining movie thanks to it.
The opening act of Black Widow is rough going: Natasha is on the run in Norway, setup with a private pad by private contractor Rick Mason (O-T Fagbenle), and a team of Russian agents in the Black Widow program are on the trail of a rogue agent when Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) suddenly ‘wakes up’ from her mind control thanks to a convenient antidote.
Yelena happens to be Natasha’s ‘sister’, during a three-year period depicted in the film’s prologue in which the two, as young girls, portrayed the fake children of a pair of Russian spies in Ohio. Through complex plot machinations, she sends the Black Widow antidote to Natasha for safekeeping.
Black Widow’s lengthy opening scenes, setting up a complex spy movie storyline, match its lead character: dour and humorless, they’re almost entirely devoid of the sense of comic book fun found in previous MCU outings.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but Black Widow’s plotting is often confusing and the initial action scenes are almost incoherent; an opening fight between Natasha and the villainous Taskmaster is so over-edited that the viewer loses all sense of continuity within the scene.
But Black Widow really picks up steam during a second-act trip to Budapest, which features massively improved action movie choreography. A rooftop run that involves knocking over a chimney, leading into a car chase that winds up in the Budapest metro, is the movie’s action highlight and genuinely exciting stuff. The historic central streets of Hungary’s capital look terrific, to boot.
The Budapest sequence also introduces the adult Natasha to her former sister, and Florence Pugh wrestles Black Widow right away from Johansson: with a hammy Russian accent, corny one-liners, and a great sense of comic timing, she’s the fun comic book version of Black Widow that Johansson’s interpretation was never given the chance to be.
Pugh’s Yelena also gets the film’s big emotional moment, shortly after the sisters are reintroduced with their former ‘parents’ in rural Russia, Alexei (David Harbour) and Melina (Rachel Weisz). These Russian spies, driven by their own selfishness and insecurities, were no family for the girls, but they were the closest thing to family they had.
Harbour and Weisz follow Pugh’s lead with the hammy accents and ripe overacting, and the second half of Black Widow turns into a fun comic book adventure as the lead character once again takes a backseat while her colorful supporting cast steals the show.
The movie gets more entertaining as it goes along, even though it largely wastes Ray Winstone as prime villain Dreykov; ditto Olga Kurylenko behind Taskmaster’s mask and cowl. And an epic action finale set atop an exploding air base floating above the clouds is a CGI mess, and entirely underwhelming compared to the first-rate Budapest sequence earlier in the film.
Black Widow ranks among the weaker MCU outings, but this one is not a misfire on the level of Thor: The Dark World or Avengers: Age of Ultron. Instead, it’s a fun one-off Marvel adventure and a welcome return to the big-screen for this kind of thing following sixteen months of delays due to the coronavirus pandemic.
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