After so many delays, it was an absolute delight to see
Black Widow in a theater nearly full of Marvel fans.
In case you are a casual Marvel Cinematic Universe fan who
only saw Endgame – do yourself a favor and watch all twenty plus movies – but beside
that you may be wondering how Black Widow can be starring in her own movie when
she is clearly dead, having sacrificed herself to ensure the survival of her
found family. This movie takes place
between Captain America Civil War and Avengers Infinity War. In case you forgot, after the events of Civil
War, Nat had bucked against the system, turning against General Thunderbolt Ross
and his Sokovia Accords to help Cap and Bucky get to Siberia to stop all the
other potential Winter Soldiers. After a
cold open highlighting Natasha’s seeming idyllic childhood in Ohio – a cover
for an undercover Russian sleeper cell - we go forward to Ross being miffed and
trying to hunt her down.
Natasha, haunted by her past and troubled by her future, is
trying to live off the grid when her ‘sister’ sends her a package from
Budapest, bringing up memories of the mission we have she and Hawkeye mention a
couple of times. Nat heads to Budapest,
encounters Yelena, and together they step back into conflict with the ‘Red Room’
system that trains Black Widows as assassins and killers while dodging the
Taskmaster – a baddie who can replicate everyone else’s fighting style. This is
a cool trait as it often pits Nat against various Avenger fighting bits. The
Red Room has stepped up its game and found a way to remove nearly all of the
human element from their agents while remaining very difficult to find. Nat and
Yelena find their former ‘parents’ to get the information necessary to bring
down the Red Room and its shadowy leader, Dreykov.
Directed by Cate Shortland, the movie certainly feels like an MCU movie with a great balance between action and comedy. The scenes with the family unit reunited are charming and fun even though they layer over the horrible things the members were responsible for accomplishing. I did think the actual mechanisms of the Red Room were glossed over a bit, but if you truly dug into that process, it may need to slide into R Rated territory, and that is not really MCU fare. What I liked best about the movie was Scarlett Johansson playing the ‘straight man’ to center and ground the film while everyone around her got to be bigger and a little more zany.
David Harbour and Rachel Weisz as Alexei and Melina respectively were great, as expected. Weisz gives Melina a chilling coldness as she talks about the mind control technology she has perfected and casually tortures one of her pigs. I knew Harbour would be fun and charming, and he is – but he is also good at the action and emotional scenes.
Ray Winstone is an interesting choice as Dreykov. He’s so incredibly cockney that the Russian accent feels very forced, but he certainly can play a villain. I wanted him to be the voice of Rocket Raccoon from the beginning, so it is a bit of a treat to see him in the MCU, even if this villain is not as developed as he could have been. Likewise, the other slight disappointment is Olga Kurylenko as Antonia, she could have been given a lot more work to do and while her character was fascinating, it felt almost tempered, and I would have liked to see that character cut loose.
Overall, I certainly enjoyed the movie from start to finish and it was even more wonderful to see it in a theater where no one moved once the credits started rolling, because we all knew to stay put and wait for the end credits sequence.
8 out of 10 – Pugh has done wonders for the sale of pocketed
vests, I’m sure.
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