Since the pandemic hit, we Marvel fans have been given some great content. WandaVision was utterly groundbreaking and wonderful and beautifully insane whilst still being utterly moving and emotional. The Falcon & The Winter Soldier gave us tons of the action that we’ve been waiting for whilst also unveiling Sam as the new Captain America whilst also laying the groundwork for the Thunderbolts/Dark Avengers. Loki introduced us to the Multiverse and a magical character arc of Loki himself whilst introducing Owen Wilson in a role he seemed born to play as Mobius.
I’m not going to claim that all of the TV shows have been hits for me. I thought Loki was ultimately suffering with some bad writing and Falcon/Winter Soldier got a little too sentimental and preachy at times for my blood.
That said, what the TV shows were able to achieve was provide breathing room for wider, richer stories to be told. Ultimately, however, the MCU has been built on movies. I was very happy when it was confirmed that they would return with Black Widow.
Originally slated to be released BEFORE Falcon/Winter Soldier aired, the COVID pandemic took its toll on the release schedule and they ended up being swapped. I was worried about that given the intertwined nature of MCU material but the worry was utterly misplaced. Aside from the post-credit scene, the movie really has very little connective tissue with the rest of the MCU.
It is set between Captain America: Civil War and Infinity War. We immediately find out that Natasha Romanov had a “family” during her childhood. One that was constructed, as opposed to being natural and therefore, the bonds between the “parents” and “children” were always fairly false. The tightest bond was between Natasha and her younger “sister”, Yelana, the only member of the family who seemed to be too young to really understand the family unit was not real. We soon learn that their “father”, Alexei portrayed by David Harbour, is a Russian version of Captain America. A super-soldier known as the Red Guardian. He is sent undercover by General Dreykov
Yelena (Florence Pugh), Alexei (David Harbour), Natasha (Scarlett Johansson)
Red Guardian is undercover in the U.S. to steal S.H.I.E.L.D. secrets. Once they’ve been retrieved, the family flee to Cuba to escape where Dreykov betrays them and takes the girls into his programme to develop ‘black widows’ – extremely highly skilled and trained assassins.
Fast Forward and a fully grown Nat defects to S.H.I.E.L.D. and is tasked with killing Dreykov. She does this by blowing up his office while he and his daughter are inside. Job done.
Fast Forward a bit more and it emerges that a team of widows have gone rogue and are under the influence of some form of mind control. This is uncovered by Yelena who sends the antidote to Nat, hoping the Avengers will free the remaining widows from the control.
So embarks a journey where Nat is reunited with Yelena and they are hunted by the mysterious Taskmaster, a ‘big bad’ who is capable of learning peoples capabilities and replicating them after watching them. The aim is to find out who is in control of the widows, take them out and free the remaining women.
For me, this was where the film dropped in the order of greatness given so many of the wonderful MCU movies that we’ve been given. Obviously no spoilers here but it doesn’t take too much mental gymnastics to work out who is pulling the strings and even the identity of Taskmaster himself. The first act of the movie is really fun and feels very “James Bond” in style and application. However, the wheels come off to a degree through the second act where the plotline unravels to a few remaining threads that are ultimately both predictable and therefore not as enthralling.
Maybe I’ve become spoiled with the TV series where there was so much time available for character development and plot building but this felt, for want of a better term, cheap. Rather than dialogue, it appeared that all plot development had to be explored through action sequences. I’m not necessarily saying that’s a bad thing and they were tremendously well executed, but the repetition did get somewhat monotonous.
The post-credit scene, however, was a revelation and lays the groundwork for at least two new splinter paths of the MCU going forward.
Did I hate Black Widow as a movie? No, absolutely not. It was fun, it was exciting, David Harbour in particular is absolutely brilliant and who doesn”t want to see Scarllett Johansson back as Nat? But the movie is not great either. It’s definitely a tier-3 MCU movie for me alongside things like Incredible Hulk and Iron Man 3. Not awful by any stretch but way below the expected quality.
