On July 2nd 2019 the movie Spider-Man: Homecoming came out in U.S. theaters. It was the third Marvel Cinematic Universe movie of that year and was supposed to be the last one before a relatively lengthy break in the run up to the May 2020 release of the next film: a long awaited solo venture for the popular Black Widow character. Little did we know at the time that a worldwide pandemic would make that break even longer but after a 738 day wait (slightly over two years) the MCU is finally back in action. Of course one has to wonder if that delay was to the franchise’s benefit, since it gave audiences a break and built up demand, or was it to their detriment since it kind of slowed the momentum? I know that when F9: The Fast Saga opened a couple of weeks ago the former was true: a bit of extra time away broke up the monotony and made things feel fresher. That might not necessarily be the case there, in part because Marvel/Disney did spend some of the pandemic releasing Marvel themed TV shows like “Wandavision” and “The Falcon and The Winter Soldier” so we haven’t ha d a break from Marvel so much as we’ve had a break from Marvel opening weekends and also the MCU left us in kind of a weird place where we’d just had a finale with Avengers: Endgame and a partial new beginning with Spider-Man: Homecoming. So this return was a little awkward, but even if it isn’t ideal I was more than a little ready to show up during the opening weekend of Black Widow.
Black Widow opens with a fairly lengthy prologue to when Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) was eleven or so and was apparently living in Ohio with her younger sister Yelena (Florence Pugh) and her parents Alexei (David Harbour) and Melina (Rachel Weisz), who are all apparently in the kind of deep cover situation made famous by the show “The Americans.” That mission ends pretty suddenly and the four of them go their separate ways within the world or Russian espionage with Natasha eventually becoming the agent who would be a fixture of the MCU’s first three phases. The bulk of this movie is set in 2016 and covers what Black Widow was up to while she was on the run for violating the Sokovia Accords after the events of Captain America: Civil War. During that period her attempts to lay low were apparently cut short because of her sister, who was still part of the Black Widow program and has come into contact with vials of a substance that cures a form of mind control that many of those agents have come under and tries to get this to Natasha, an action that puts both of them in the crosshairs of a ruthless and methodical assassin called The Taskmaster.
Getting Black Widow a solo movie was something of a cause célèbre around phases one and two of the MCU, in part because the whole enterprise was being criticized for its lack of female superheroes being given solo films. Personally I sympathized with the frustrations that caused that uproar more than I agreed with the proposed solution. Black Widow to me was not a terribly interesting character: essentially a super-spy rather than a true hero, her solo film was inevitably just going to be a more explosion filled version of a Bourne movie or a James Bond movie, which obviously isn’t an inherently bad thing but wasn’t necessarily what this franchise needed and in general I didn’t see any more of a need such a film than I did for a Nick Fury or Hawkeye solo effort (though we now essentially got the former through Captain Marvel and are getting the latter via a Disney+ show). That said, if they were going to make a Black Widow movie that probably would have been the time to do it and making one now, after the character already supposedly died in Avengers: Endgame (we’ll see if that lasts) is particularly head-scratching. Still there were some spots of lore to fill in and the movie does a reasonably good job of doing that by explaining some of Romanoff’s backstory and however this fits in there’s obviously could simply be an opportunity for some solid action thrills.
I will say I found the first half of this movie rather disappointing. The prologue was kind of neat (though I hated a musical choice used to transition out of it) and thought there was some promise in the setup, but something felt off about the whole thing. There was comedy, but it wasn’t as sharp and I didn’t like the film’s look, which was drab and gray even by Marvel standards. I would also say that Taskmaster was a very lame villain, a total retread of The Winder Soldier who brings nothing new to the table and had they not revealed themselves to be more of a henchman than a villain in the second half it would have been a pretty big problem. Fortunately things do improve at a certain point. Eventually the family from the prologue come together as adults and we get a sort of fun take on the dysfunctional family comedy by being given a dysfunctional family of super-spies and the comedy starts working better when David Harbour shows up as the bumbling patriarch. The second half also introduces a better villain who provides some interesting moments in the finale. Still I’m not sure I ever quite felt that Marvel magic at work. A lot of the action here felt a bit perfunctory; it had the scope of destruction from the other MCU films but the absence of actual superpowers did detract from them and the comedy never quite clicked with me.
It is of course not lost on the filmmakers that this film is trying to bring depth to a character that was rather heavily sexualized during her first couple of outings in the MCU and director Cate Shortland throws some jabs in that direction and the film’s ultimate villain is pretty clearly supposed to represent the patriarchy at its most extreme. Still these themes don’t run terribly deep and don’t feel overly unprecedented; Captain Marvel operated at a similar level but generally had more fun with it. Beyond that the whole thing just felt rather inessential both as a Marvel movie and as an action movie. It’s not a disaster or anything, go see it and you will be amused at the very least, but Marvel has raised the bar quite a bit in the last four years or so and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to hold them to their own high standards and this doesn’t really stack up. Then again, maybe I woke up on the wrong side of the bed the day I watched it? This is only really the second major blockbuster we got in theaters post pandemic and I must say I think F9: The Fast Saga delivered for its fans more than this one did. That movie was all kinds of stupid but it was at least interested in topping its predecessors, this one on the other hand almost felt like a contractual obligation that was fulfilled with minimal enthusiasm.
**1/2 out of Five
The Movie Vampire 
The lack of a movie had nothing to do with suppressing feminism, it had to do with the fact that Black Widow was/is sort of a boring character. On top of it, it is quite asinine that a “super spy” with “kick-ass combat skills” could even remotely help the usual bevy of Marvel characters in any way possible whether it be physically (The Hulk, Thor) or intellectually. (Tony Stark and *ahem* The Hulk) The only thing she was remotely capable of was flying the damn jet and maybe berating someone for comic effect.