'Black Widow' Review: Marvel's Late-Arriving, But Action-Packed Solo Story
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Though set between the events of 2016’s CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR and 2018’s AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR, the long-awaited solo movie BLACK WIDOW feels, at times, like an overdue origin story for the character. Amongst the expansive group of super-people in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), there are a few of them, such as Natasha Romanoff (Black Widow) who do not have any unnatural super abilities. She was never injected with a super-serum like Steve Rogers (Captain America), she’s not equipped with hyper-technological armor like Tony Stark (Iron Man), nor was she enhanced by the effects of gamma radiation like her friend (and sometimes love interest) Bruce Banner (The Hulk). Instead, Natasha’s strength as a superhero is her precision in combat and her wits to outsmart the enemy. Throughout the 23 previous films in the MCU, we have learned bits and pieces of Natasha’s mysterious and complicated past. We know she was a trained Russian spy, having been tortured in the infamous Red Room, we know she cannot bear children as a result of her training to be a Widow, and we know that she and Clint Barton (Hawkeye) remember Budapest very differently. While also filling in the gaps and answering some questions that had been left lingering by the previous films, BLACK WIDOW takes us all the way back to Natasha as a child and shows us how she went from an innocent, angsty teenanger to a heroic Avenger.
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The movie begins with a prologue set in Ohio in 1995 showing Natasha as a blue-haired teen around the age of 13 or so, playing with her younger sister, Yelena. The pair later sit down for dinner with their mother, Melina (Rachel Weisz) and their father, Alexei (David Harbour) before being told that they have an hour to pack up their lives and flee to safety as imminent danger is approaching. A hectic and pulsating action sequence ensues until it ultimately ends with the two girls being taken away to be sent off to the Red Room to become Widows. Flash-forward to 21 years later where we meet up with adult Natasha (Scarlett Johansson) on a quest to reconnect with her family to take down, once and for all, General Dreykov (Ray Winstone), who was the man behind the Red Room.
The first act of the film more or less involves the re-assembling of Natasha and her family, which includes a comedic standoff between Johansson and Florence Pugh (playing her sister, Yelena), before they ultimately team up to break their father, Alexei, out of prison (yet another comedic sequence, and it is worth noting that Harbour’s performance is equal parts funny and deeply touching from the moment he is on screen). After the successful rescue of their dad, the sisters learn through him that their mother, Melina, whom they thought to be dead all of these years, is actually alive and can lead them directly to Dreykov. This newfound mission sets off the second act of the film before taking us to the climactic third act where it is the family vs. the Red Room and its Widows.
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The main villain of the film is the mysterious Taskmaster; a highly-skilled assassin whose greatest power is that they can match the fighting styles of their enemies. In an excellent sequence between the Taskmasker and Natasha fighting on a bridge, thinking she is under attack, Natasha pulls out some of her signature moves only to discover that the Taskmaster is an equal match to her—as well as that Taskmaster isn’t actually after her, but rather a case full of a mysterious bottled liquid that instantaneously knocks the Widows out of their brainwashing when opened. The reveal of Taskmaster’s true identity ties well into not only what we had learned in previous films, but what is set up here, and has a touching emotional payoff at the end of the film.
The film is filled with the kind of sequences we have come to know and love in the MCU—handheld camera movements, exciting and impressive fight choreography, vast visual landscapes that place viewers in the center of the action, and plenty of explosions to create a stimulating visual spectacle. But a major accomplishment in this film which makes it stand out from its predecessors is the deep connection to the idea of family and the looming questions of identity and belonging with which Natasha always struggles with. We learn that the family we see in the prologue isn’t quite what we think it is, and seeing as it takes place following the events of CIVIL WAR, Natasha frequently references the current divide in her chosen family, The Avengers. By the end of the film’s events, Natasha does finally seem to reach some sort of peace between how she views her relationships with both families, realizing that underneath the hard exterior she has been forced to build up her entire life, she can and has accepted people into her life that she holds dear.
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Johansson is at her best, here, not only in getting to show the nuanced layers of Natasha, but seeming to have connected deeply and intimately to her character in ways we had not seen in the previous films. The rich backstory we are given, which highlights hard-to-swallow details of Natasha’s past, only adds depth to the stories we have seen play out for her on screen and draws the audience closer to a character that they already had sympathy for. Tie in her outstanding on-screen chemistry with Pugh (who steals the show), and it leaves for an almost-perfect solo film…that should have come out 5 years ago. Therein lies the only major downfall of the film—everything that is good in the movie is good because the groundwork for this story has been slowly laid out over the course of 23 films. Had this movie actually come out during the time frame it’s set in, it would have felt perfectly-timed and grounded in the MCU, before the (spoilers!) demise of the character in 2019’s AVENGERS: ENDGAME. While the movie itself should not be faulted to what ultimately comes down to poor scheduling issues with the studio, it’s hard to watch it and not think about the fact that no matter what plays out onscreen, Natasha is already dead. We’re never going to get to see new interactions with her and Pugh, we’ll never get to see how future movies would have affected us differently now knowing what we do about her past and the time she spent between these two major timestamps in the MCU, and more than likely we will never again get to see Johansson don the red locks and leather suit that are so instantly recognizable.
This being said, what works in the film works really well, and the minor messy details in the storyline (as well as some highly questionable CGI work—surprising, this many films into the MCU) are easy to forgive and push to the side. With an outstanding cast, an engaging emotional core with impressive action woven in-between, BLACK WIDOW succeeds at being a solid entry into the filmography of the MCU while giving the fans the much-deserved look into what formed the character into the beloved person that we had come to know and love.