Black Widow is a film out of time and place. Like its title character, it’s destined to sit at a strange spot in the Marvel Studios pantheon. Black Widow the character is a human assassin who often stands alongside gods to do battle with titans, killer robots, and the great powers of the cosmos. Black Widow the film has been, like all Marvel films, hotly anticipated, but it simultaneously feels a little late to the party.
Note: This review contains some light spoilers.
The film finds the titular hero Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) picking up the pieces after the events of Captain America: Civil War in 2016, years before the conflict with Thanos that (spoilers for Avengers: Endgame) would result in her death. With many of her allies in prison and more of her former allies hunting for her guns blazing, Romanoff goes to ground and swears she’s out of the game. When her long lost kind-of-sort-of-sister Yelena (Florence Pugh) calls her back to action, the pair reluctantly team up to root out a conspiracy from their pasts, meeting up with their Soviet state-assigned mother and father (Rachel Weisz and David Harbour).
This framing of the story creates a problem that looms over the film. If the film debuted in theaters at the time it takes place in the Marvel canon, it still would’ve felt overdue. A founding Avenger who has often felt underdeveloped, Natasha’s origin and inner life have been marginalized to suggestions of all the “red in her ledger,” a heavily-debated aside accused of equating infertility to monstrousness, and veiled references to a mission in Budapest. A solo film that fleshed out her origins and motivations has felt like a missing piece in the Marvel puzzle for awhile, especially given how many other Avengers (both founding and newcoming) have already received that treatment. In terms of scale, Black Widow also feels more of a piece with Marvel’s Phase Two offerings than its more recent fare, be it the oversized epics of Phase Three or the offbeat (for Marvel, anyways) Disney+ shows. Its closest cousin is likely Iron Man 3, a film that sidelined the Avengers to tell a character-centered story about the trauma and anxiety that lingers after the day is saved.
Yet the film’s actual release comes half a decade later, which is already more than a year later than intended thanks to several COVID-19 delays. Slated to be the opening salvo of Phase Four, only to become the studio’s fourth release (of a planned ten!) this year. Jumping into a market already oversaturated with Marvel’s offerings, the meta-narrative that Black Widow is saddled with costs the film some of its relevance, but it gains some juice from that narrative as well.
Narratively, the film sidesteps questions about its relevance by acting mostly as a sequel to an origin film we never got to see. This isn’t a film about Natasha becoming a double agent, it’s about the costs of her decision to do so, both for herself and those she loves. To quote another franchise that acts as a heavy point of inspiration here, it’s about “the fallout of all [her] good intentions.” In that way, it’s both separate from and in conversation with those criticisms, giving us a window into Black Widow’s soul while also arguing that this film that finds Natasha at a crossroads is more interesting than her unfilmed origins.
As a piece of pure entertainment, Black Widow has the goods. A Marvel film interwoven with the aesthetics of a modern spy action-thriller, fans of Skyfall, the Bourne films, and the newer Mission: Impossible movies will find a lot to like here, with chase sequences, brutal fisticuffs, and some well timed jumps off of very high places. Unlike other Marvel films that only dabble in their genres, Black Widow feels like it would be a fully functional and entertaining film if you stripped away all of the MCU signifiers. If anything, those signifiers are something of a weak spot for the film. The primary villain plucked from the source material, Taskmaster, feels like something of an afterthought here – though Taskmaster factors heavily into the plot, the character’s nondescript appearance and lack of personality serve to diminish them in the plot.
Continued belowAmidst all that action, director Cate Shortland is careful to keep coming back to the characters at the heart of the violence. There’s plenty of discourse online about the visual aesthetics of the MCU, but Shortland mostly sidesteps the Marvel muddyness by zooming in close on her character’s faces and drawing out some deeply human moments amidst the superspy chaos. As a character story, this is the best Marvel has ever been, with that meaningful camerawork aided in no small part by the stellar performances from the other three members of Natasha’s long lost family.
No one conveys those human moments better than Florence Pugh. She walks a fine tightrope between conflicting motivations, nailing a portrayal of a younger sibling that feels overlooked by her family while she grapples with a similarly traumatic upbringing. She has nothing to prove and everything to prove all at once. Topping all that off, she’s also incredibly charming and funny, piercing Johansson’s self-serious action heroine with wit and grace. If Black Widow serves to pass Pugh the baton for future installments, the franchise is in great hands.
Rachel Weisz, often a delight on-screen, is in a different mode here, one that lets her be compelling and unnerving in the same breath. David Harbour, functionally the family’s comic relief, hits the precisely correct tone, dealing the Marvel-required quips and comedy without overplaying his hand. Credit is also due to the screenplay by Eric Pearson and story by Ned Benson & WandaVision showrunner Jac Schaeffer, which rarely falls into over-exposition and trusts the ability of the director and the performers to deliver the emotions visually. The odd duck here, strangely, is the titular hero herself. Natasha’s flattened affect could generously be treated as a side effect of her upbringing, but it stands out when the other super spies find ways to effectively project the emotions brewing under a frosty exterior. When she finally gets the chance for some sort of catharsis, Johansson does strong work in selling the shift, but it feels like a too late window into a character whose time in the franchise has ended.
It circles back to the feeling that, though well-crafted and entertaining, Black Widow comes too late to have its full impact. Still, this is a strong entry in the MCU, and while it falls short as a swan song, it excels as a popcorn thriller with a big beating heart.
