Black Widow (2021)

Giving the Widow Her Due

or

Lord Help the Min'ster Who Comes Between Me and My Sister.

The Marvel character, Black Widow (played eight previous times by Scarlett Johansson) has appeared in almost as many Marvel movies as Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man (and Samuel L. Jackson's Nicky Fury)...but, without a feature of her own. Sure, Marvel can crow about being progressive on roles for women after Captain Marvel, but, look at the facts: BW has appeared in an Iron Man movie, two Captain America films, an unbilled cameo in Captain Marvel, all four Avengers movies...and was the sacrificial lamb in the last one. Er, except that more attention was paid to the death of Tony Stark, and the Big Funeral at the end—with "everybody" in it—was for Stark. Just Stark.

At the end of Avengers: Endgame, Black Widow's sacrifice was merely an after-thought...maybe something was said at the reception (oh, except everybody was more concerned with who'd be the next Captain America...). Bowed heads was all she got. And then "Phase 3" ended.

Almost as an afterthought, Marvel Studios has given the character her own movie...now that she's safely dead and all—they'd been talking about it since 2004—and, like most initial Marvel films in a franchise, it's a good one (Marvel's second movies tend to be inferior bloats—the exceptions being the Captain America franchise—where all three films were good, and "Thor" where there wasn't a good film until the wildly irreverent third one).

Black Widow in Iron Man 2

But, Black Widow is on a par with the good introductory Marvel films, seeming fresh and giving much more back-story than had been given Natasha Romanoff in her previous appearances. In the MARVEL series, Nat was the glue that held people and missions together—if Nat was on your side, you were alright. Yet, her abilities, which were not super-powered, managed to put in her in the fray of most of the fights with the "Big Guns." Plus, she knew how to manipulate—calming down The Hulk, tricking Loki—she does something similar here ("Thanks for your cooperation" she says again here)—siding with Captain America while ostensibly trying to arrest him. She was a team-player while being her own person. And there was no questioning it that, after "The Blip," she would be the acting leader (as if they had one before...) of What Was Left Of The Avengers. Nat was the good soldier who didn't whine about things—she'd sit at conference tables with furrowed brow listening and thinking, while "The Boys" mansplained and postured. Not Nat, though. Just got 'er done, dude.

So, her self-titled movie is a good run—Johansson even got to Executive Produce *ka-ching!*—and it's a fast moving kind of "James Bond movie"—with several of the tropes on display, one former Bond "girl" in the cast and the plot of one of them taken whole-cloth (and combined with elements of the Mission Impossible franchise and In Like Flint)—but amped up to 11...It's a Bond movie for those who think a typical Bond movie is You Only Live Twice or Moonraker...with the stunts and situations moving beyond the outlandish to the preposterous. I was chortling in the theater watching Russian soldiers firing automatic weapons in free-fall. Tough to get volunteers with that kind of work.

Which is rather the point of the movie.

But, I digress. The movie, however, regresses.

We start out in Ohio, where two undercover Russian agents, Melina and Alexei (Rachel Weisz and David Harbour) live as "tyeepical" Americans (as long as the don't use the words "moose and squirrel") with their daughters Natasha and Yelena, when one night they make their escape to Cuba from agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and report back to their contact Dreykov (Ray Winstone). Melina has been wounded in the escape and Alexei, part of the USSR's "super-soldier" program as "the Red Guardian" reassures the kids that "Uncle" Dreykov will take care of them, but he doesn't tell them it's by imprisoning them in the "Red Door" facility and training them to become killers in the Black Widow program.

Cut to a Main Title sequence which fast-forwards through their training and some history—set inexplicably to "Smells Like Teen Spirit!"—to the film's proper timeline, nestling between Captain America: Civil War—because Hawkeye, Falcon and Ant-Man are in prison and William Hurt's "Thunderbolt" Ross is on the hunt for Nat—and Avengers: Infinity War where things get hairy. Nat has gone to ground, and her mail has piled up while in hiding—one of the packages contains glowing red vials and puts her in the cross-hairs of a villain called "Taskmaster" who can duplicate an opponent's moves merely by watching them.

Hey! Taskmaster's watching that first gif on this page!

It turns out the mail came from step-sister Yelena Bovel (Florence Pugh, who is spot-on perfect—and she better be because the movie is her audition for any sequels), who, while working as one Russia's widows got a snoot-full of one of those vials, which released her from Dreykov's psychotropic grip, breaking his mental hold over her to do whatever evil deed he has put into both their minds. Yelena is as dedicated as a QVC host to get these vials into people's hands, so she sends them to Natasha because 1) she's not hiding from Dreykov in Budapest like she is, she's hiding from S.H.I.E.L.D, who is looking for Nat all around the whole frickin' world and 2) she's an "Avenger" so her scientific friends can make more of the glowing red stuff in the vials. So, what does Nat do?—she goes to Budapest to find her sister. Because..."movie"

Together, they plan their revenge on Dreykov, starting by springing Alexei from the gulag hell-hole where he's imprisoned and finding Melina at her compound/lab—as she knows where the secret "Red Door" facility is and planning their attack. Sounds simple—there's barely enough plot for a full movie—but they have to do this while being pursued by Dreykov's army of widows and Taskmaster, so there are lots of action set-pieces, lots of bone-crunching (with seemingly little effect) and bickering—so much bickering—between the reunited family. It's funny, fast-paced, and barely believable...but when has believability stopped a superhero movie?

It all leads to an action set-piece in one of those "yeah, I'm not buying it" supervillain lairs that beggars the imagination that it could ever maintain itself without a lot of expenditure and a lot of luck, making one believe that it's powered by "suspension of disbelief," which may be the most powerful force in the Marvel Universe. As I said, I was repressing giggles, even as people are running up the sides of blown apart architecture that is hurtling to the Earth. I'd heard some pre-publicity talk about the action being "gritty" and "down to Earth" but it isn't in any way shape or form, heavily dependent on CGI wizardry (all the big names and quite a number of small digital companies are in the credits) and "down to Earth" is only applicable on letting you know where everything lands...in conveniently sparse locations. 

We also get some check-boxes ticked off—if anybody had been keeping score—about Natasha's past activities, one of which comes back to haunt her. It's one of those convenient stories that drive continuity-conscious comics fans nuts, but what can you do? They're different worlds and the movie doesn't have the run-time to accommodate any lengthy back-story, or do justice to "Taskmaster" fans.

Director Cate Shortland does wonderful work with the performances and the actors keeping the dialog breezy, overlapping and understandable (and the picture-editing that complicates it is adroit and nimble). Everybody's good when they're talking and interacting. But, the action scenes? Not so much. They seem to be story-boarded and shot to accomplish one move and it may or may not be related to the next shot/action or the one before it, as opposed to a cohesive whole that can be followed and a sense of the challenges and the surroundings inherent in it. It builds suspense and makes the action even more thrilling. Here, it's just a shot of an actor doing the action, there's a cut-away reaction, or meld with the stunt-double, but that's about it, and the next shot may be a larger perspective, or an insert of some particular aspect of the resulting conflagration. But, there's no flow to it—you get a kick-shot and the next shot is the kicked guy hitting the opposite wall. You know the two should be linked, but it's a leap for the audience.

And so much of it is action that it's a major chore to make your way through them, and once the Big "Blow-Uppy" Final Round starts happening, you might be forgiven for giving up and just letting things happen, looking at things uncritically. It's then that things get very dubious with a lot of fights happening in mid-air and shots of Natasha plummet/flying around hurtling debris and even a sequence where Nat crawls up some facade in free fall approaching terminal velocity with apparently no wind resistance. And then, you remember that Black Widow ultimately will die (or has already died if you're looking at it in movie-sequence) from a long fall* and one that isn't even as long as this one.

Okay, that's all dubiously on the surface. What made me smile as I was leaving the theater was that Black Widow, with all its talk about, and taking steps to stop, Dreykov's sapping of so many women's free will to do his nefarious bidding (without any dissent) makes it (when you reduce it down) a pro-choice movie. Pro-choice in a way that might impress both liberals and conservatives (but, I doubt it, I don't trust ideologies to be logical or consistent). With women executives and a woman director, I find that a lovely little shot-across-the-bow of the patriarchy, and gives this after-thought of the Marvel Studios...worth.

 

*

From Avengers: Endgame