Black Wid­ow

When she’s not babysit­ting the Avengers, Black Wid­ow, aka Natasha Romanoff (Scar­lett Johans­son), is on the run. In this spin-off we learn that she was brought up as a mem­ber of a Russ­ian sleep­er cell in sub­ur­ban Ohio, and was bru­tal­ly flung into the world of covert ops and assas­si­na­tion. Shat­ter­ing the zen of her hid­ing place in the Nor­we­gian moun­tains, Natasha is recon­nect­ed with her adopt­ed sis­ter Yele­na (Flo­rence Pugh) who forces her back into bat­tle against the Red Room, the sin­is­ter Sovi­et school that trained the pair to be killers.

Flit­ting between glob­al heists and chas­ing after mys­te­ri­ous red vials with the usu­al dis­re­gard for prop­er­ty destruc­tion, Black Wid­ow feels more like an instal­ment in the Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble fran­chise than part of the extend­ed MCU. Like 2018’s Fall­out, Lorne Balfe’s sound­track brings out the big guns, charg­ing the dizzy­ing action set-pieces with ener­gy and excite­ment. For the full impact of the sound and the sheer scale of the whole endeav­our, a cin­e­ma trip is worthwhile.

The way direc­tor Cate Short­land shoots the fight scenes con­trasts the clean, bright aes­thet­ic of Natasha’s intro­duc­tion in Iron Man 2. Self-con­scious­ly avoid­ing those slow-motion pos­es, the action sequences here don’t pause in the same way, instead embrac­ing the light­ning-fast tech­nique of these skilled assas­sins. The shaky cam­era move­ments do make the chore­og­ra­phy hard­er to appre­ci­ate, but these char­ac­ters final­ly look as lethal as they’re meant to be.

Though Yelena’s near con­stant excla­ma­tions of ​“shit”, along with Pugh’s best grav­el­ly Russ­ian accent, are charm­ing, much of the lev­i­ty comes from the inap­pro­pri­ate atti­tudes of her adopt­ed par­ents. Father Alex­ei, the would-be Sovi­et super­hero Red Guardian (David Har­bour), believes him­self to be a Com­mu­nist ver­sion of Cap­tain Amer­i­ca, while evil sci­en­tist moth­er Meli­na (Rachel Weisz) has a nice line in dead­pan quips. The humour is hit and miss, but each actor brings their own charis­ma and some very sil­ly line deliv­ery makes it all work.

Pri­or to this solo run-out, Black Widow’s sto­ry­line has been hand­ed down by Joss Whe­don and the Rus­so broth­ers with vary­ing degrees of sex­ism, rang­ing from out­right objec­ti­fi­ca­tion to off-hand dis­missal. That is to say, the bar is on the floor when it comes to doing some­thing that actu­al­ly gives this char­ac­ter some depth and nuance.

Eric Pearson’s script eas­i­ly pass­es this low stan­dard but, as the hero­ine says her­self, she does not stop long enough to think about her own sto­ry. We do final­ly learn what hap­pened in Budapest – a mys­te­ri­ous inci­dent men­tioned in sev­er­al pre­vi­ous Mar­vel films – but while Johans­son shines, she does share the spot­light with Pugh in a way that lim­its what we learn about her as an individual.

Stereo­typ­i­cal notions of wom­an­hood mean the writ­ing often dances around the trau­ma that these sis­ters have expe­ri­enced. A rev­e­la­tion about forced hys­terec­tomies is brushed off as a joke for mak­ing men squea­mish, and one bond­ing moment includes a more suc­cess­ful cel­e­bra­tion of clothes with pock­ets. (It is a good jack­et; Pugh looks very Han Solo in it. But I digress…)

Dis­ap­point­ing­ly, the Red Room years aren’t explored beyond an open­ing cred­its mon­tage and we don’t learn any­thing about the oth­er Wid­ows being oper­at­ed by Ray Winstone’s oli­garch-like antag­o­nist Dreykov. This pro­cras­ti­na­tion, which will pre­sum­ably be addressed more ful­ly in future sequels, makes the world of the film feel like hol­low set dressing.

Yet Black Wid­ow imbues the title char­ac­ter with gen­uine per­son­al­i­ty beyond her sul­try one-lin­ers and asso­ci­a­tion with the Avengers, even if the explo­ration of her eman­ci­pa­tion is super­fi­cial. The film also adds some much-need­ed joy and female com­pan­ion­ship to a time­line that is too often dark and doomy. As Pugh’s first block­buster out­ing, this is an enter­tain­ing and mem­o­rable entry into a con­vo­lut­ed saga.

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