Black Widow (2021)
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Black Widow Movie Review
Black Widow is a 2021 superhero spy film directed by Cate Shortland and starring Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh. It’s an expectedly stale flick.
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“I’ve lived a lot of lives…
But I’m done running from my past“
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This movie is set in the timeline between ‘Civil War’ and ‘Infinity War’, and simply that fact that it’s not a sequel nor is it a prequel to any of the previous MCU movies, but sitting right in the middle is problematic as it only alludes to the redundancy of this entire project. They wanted to give Johansson her own movie and they wanted to satisfy the fans of the character who asked for this film for years, but I still think that she’s better off as a supporting than a main character, and this film is a proof of that.
Marvel movies tend to shift between genres, and this is the first time that they genuinely went into the espionage territory. Functioning as this spy thriller that is also a globetrotting adventure reminiscent of Bond movies, the film certainly has a different feel to it than other MCU movies, plus the fact that it is so small-scale in dangers and villains also helped differentiate it even further.
But that approach was a double-edged sword. Throughout the film, I wished for more fantastical elements and the regular superhero action that was mostly missing here. While we do get to see some of that, for the most part the movie is a spy action flick and that’s pretty much it. It’s not even a great spy movie as the characters aren’t all that well developed and the storyline is largely quite uninspired. We do get to see some answers regarding the character’s origins, but for the most part her story isn’t cinema-worthy and another character was much more memorable than Widow herself.
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I am of course talking about Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova. This is a character that is instantly memorable, well developed and also quite interesting in her arc and especially her somewhat arrogant personality. She’s the funniest and best part of the movie, and that was in no small part thanks to Pugh’s committed performance, though her and other Russian accents in the movie were questionable.
Pugh is so great that it’s easy to see how this will lead to her future appearances in the MCU and possibly she would take the mantle from Natasha now that she is gone. I am all up for it myself. Johansson is also good here, but again Pugh and Yelena entirely steal the show from her, which is quite embarrassing given that this was supposed to be a Black Widow movie.
David Harbour is too silly and goofy in a role that wasn’t all that great. Taskmaster is excellent and rather compelling in look and abilities, but for the most part the action in the film was disappointing. Actually, it’s polarizing as in the first act we get some excellent fights that were so well executed, but the second half ruined all of that with way too much CGI and a typical audio-visual mess that most superhero movies share these days.
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I didn’t hate Black Widow, but I did find this one to be one of the weakest Marvel movies, for sure in the five worst, though far from the failures of the second Thor and second Iron Man movies. Cate Shortland did not do anything to elevate this material with her direction and the script alone was just quite subpar.
