Black Widow

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, O-T Fagbenle, Olga Kurylenko, William Hurt, Ray Winstone, Rachel Weisz

Director: Cate Shortland

Writer: Eric Pearson

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Since making her debut on Iron Man 2, when the Marvel Cinematic Universe hadn’t yet become a known quantity, and especially after 2012’s The Avengers when she became a more fully-formed character, Black Widow has been a favourite amongst Marvel fans and the demand for a solo title has always been present. And yet, despite the unprecedented global popularity and cultural dominance that the MCU has since attained and the proven bankability of star Scarlett Johansson, Marvel has been loath to do it until now, their 24th instalment, after the character’s unceremonial death in Avengers: Endgame. Maybe they feel safe doing it now after Captain Marvel and DC’s Wonder Woman demonstrated that audiences will in fact pay to watch superhero films with female protagonists (a novel concept, I know), or perhaps it has more to do with the studio launching Phase 4 and needing a new character to step into the Black-Widow-shaped hole that Endgame left, but in any case here is the Black Widow film that the fans have been waiting for. Was it worth the wait? Well, if you want to hear a bit more about how the SHIELD spy came to be who she is and what happened in Budapest, I guess? If you want to actually see all that stuff for yourself, no. Even if the film weren’t too little too late by this stage and had been made, say, five years earlier, it’s just not particularly good or interesting.

So the film is set in the interim between Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War (the interwar period?). Natasha Romanoff (Johansson) is on the run and trying to keep a low profile. Only it looks like her mysterious past is about to catch up with her. When Yelena (Florence Pugh), another Black Widow assassin, is infected with a synthetic gas that cures her of the mind control she’d been kept under for years, she reaches out to the only person she can think of to help, her defected older sister. Contrary to what Natasha had heretofore believed, the Red Room that trained them both is still going strong under the leadership of General Dreykov (Ray Winstone), the man Natasha thought she’d killed when she left and joined SHIELD. Now the estranged sisters must team up to bring the covert agency down and to do so they need the help of the agents who’d been their mother and father back in Ohio when they were sleeper cells posing as a normal family. These are Russian super soldier Alexei Shostakov, a.k.a. Red Guardian (David Harbour), the USSR’s answer to Captain America, now being held in a Siberian prison, and Black Widow scientist Melina Vostokoff (Rachel Weisz, overdue a Mummy revival). Together they will team up to take down the Red Room that is the architect of all their sorrows and find in each other the family they’ve missed for all these years.

There are at least three major threads that this movie wants to tie together. Firstly there is an attempt at an arc for Natasha, who finds herself alone in the world because she has no family she can turn to (this includes the Avengers who have broken up by this point in the timeline, although they do unconvincingly try to play on this idea that Natasha still doesn’t consider them her family). Secondly, there is an attempt to fill in some of the blanks of her backstory to which the other films have alluded (there is a passing mention of Dreykov’s daughter in The Avengers). Thirdly, there is an attempt to set up Yelena as the successor to Black Widow’s mantle in the MCU. This is a lot for a single film to handle and the three ideas themselves are not totally compatible. By setting Yelena up as a player in the MCU titles to come, the movie necessarily has to make Natasha cede some of the spotlight in her own movie. It definitely does Natasha no favours that Pugh is so good in the role and that her character is in fact given the more compelling arc, that of a lost soul confronting the reality that the three years their sleeper cell family lived in Ohio, which she remembers being as the best years of her life, were founded on a lie and, with her free will restored, it now falls onto her to decide what to make of her life.

The main issue plaguing Black Widow is that it is just a boring film, one that attempts to emulate the espionage thrills of The Bourne Identity and Mission: Impossible – Fallout, but instead comes closer to The Bourne Legacy and Quantum of Solace. While fans of Marvel are familiar enough with Black Widow by this stage that not a great deal of set-dressing is needed, the conflict that envelops her is built around a history that is mostly unknown to the audience and involves four main characters, including the villain, whom we have never met before. A lot of groundwork therefore needs to be laid out to draw the viewer in, but apart from the rather good opening scene that treats us to a spin on The Americans, the movie is constantly putting itself on pause to relay the relevant info through dialogue. The reunion between Natasha and Yelena and the face-off between her and Dreykov should both have a lot more weight to them akin to an equivalent scene with Thor and Loki, but they don’t because we’ve barley seen their characters interact beforehand and the history between them is still being established while the scenes themselves are unfolding. The grievance Yelena holds for Natasha is that she abandoned her when she defected, yet the last scene where we saw of them together as kids had Natasha leaping to her defence. Without this kind of groundwork being established in concrete terms beforehand, these character moments don’t land.

The film is also boring because it isn’t particularly well-made. Directed by Cate Shortland, whose last feature Berlin Syndrome was a Sundance Film Festival selection, Black Widow suffers from the same kinds of issues that the MCU movies often do now that Disney has adopted the habit of handing the films over to smaller directors with less experience of how to direct big-budget blockbusters and therefore tend to bring fewer demands to the table. The action is choppily over-edited to the point that continuity and geography often get lost, the climax plays like it was rendered by a second unit crew (which it was) rather than composed and directed with clarity of purpose, and the visual aesthetic is the same flat, muddy colour grading that Marvel treats as the default. Individual moments are often good and entertaining, like Natasha and Yelena tying each other into a chokehold in their introductory fight, but the whole is just barely competent. The movie is edited like it’s in a constant hurry (and no wonder at 134 minutes) so moments pass by without enough of a beat to let it sink in and the editing within and between scenes is too often jarring (when Natasha returns to her hideout in one scene to find her procurement specialist Rick (O-T Fagbenle) sleeping on her bed, the cut to him standing and talking to her made me think there were two of him).

The stronger point is with the aspect that the MCU movies have always handled more or less well, the characters. There is, to start, Natasha herself who, as played by Johansson, remains a formidable screen presence. Johansson has a particular talent for being able to make a character moment land with just a look where no line of dialogue has been given to her. Alexei and Melina also make for enjoyable additions and their family interactions along with Pugh do make for a really good showcase for each of the four performers. One moment I especially liked was that between Alexei and Yelena, where the feckless, self-centred buffoon demonstrates in an unexpected gesture that he does have some fond memories of the time they spent together as a family. Where the movie falls short is this regard is with Natasha’s actual arc, as the movie has her ending up more or less where she started, and with Dreykov, who stands as one of the franchise’s dullest villains along with whatshisname and whosit. It feels especially egregious, in fact, that Natasha is given such a listless presence in her own film given how her story ended in her last movie. Black Widow feels less like a fitting send off to her than it does a final insult. I hope they at least do better with Yelena.

★★