‘Black Widow’ Review: A Solid Movie in Search of Identity
After a two year hiatus from the big screen, Marvel is back with their signature brand of filmmaking, blending competent action, fun characters, humor, and fan service in a formula that is still as effective as ever. While it’s hard to find a Marvel movie one would call great, this calculated approach has brought out a lot of consistently good movies, and Black Widow fits right in, for the most part.
Scarlett Johansson returns as the titular super spy, this time with an origin story and plenty of unfinished business. The movie takes place between Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War, with Black Widow on the run from US authorities. After a chance encounter with another spy, Yelena (her “sister” from her childhood, played by Florence Pugh), she becomes embroiled in a plan to destroy the Red Room (not the one from Twin Peaks), a facility that turns young women into assassins via mind control.
Like all Marvel movies, the performances are solid, and so is the action and general plotting of the story. Like some others, Black Widow struggles with its narrative and maintaining a consistent tone and sense of self. The film begins like a Bourne ripoff, a dark, seedy thriller about espionage, mind control, and human trafficking, and it’s all pretty engaging. Then about halfway through it turns into another jokey superhero movie, complete with a fistfight atop the falling debris of an exploding Castle in the Sky-esque airbase which is also pretty fun. The problem is that these two types of movies, while good on their own, don’t mesh well together, and one gets whiplash going from dark scenes of child trafficking, torture, and forced sterilization, among other things, to the usual Marvel stuff. The film seems to want to be more serious than it is, and it seems to want to make some sort of point as well about how the world treats its most vulnerable members, especially women and children, but it gets lost in the obligatory blockbuster noise.
The action scenes are all very good and continue to be a strong point for the Marvel movies, weaving stunt work and top notch CGI together to make something fast paced, exciting, and coherent, however there is no particular moment that is especially memorable as they all have a tendency to blend together. One thing that does stick out is the absolutely insane amount of damage that Black Widow and Yelena take over the course of the movie. For characters who don’t have any sort of superpowers, they should have died probably 20 times over the course of the film’s many bombastic action scenes. The CGI also falters a bit during some of these, with a few too many shots of people running or falling away from obviously fake flames and explosions. There are at least four of these all packed together in the finale, and some of them are absolutely comical.
Another thing that is comical about the movie, besides the actual jokes, which are fine, is everyone’s fake Russian accent. It’s weird to see so many non-Russians try to pull of the accent and resort to the stereotypical Hollywood version, some better than others. The film’s main villain, Ray Winstone playing an evil Russian general, struggles mightily with the accent task, as Winstone’s signature London tough-guy way of speaking overrides his Russian accent at all times.
All in all, Black Widow is a solid, if somewhat messy, entry into the now massive Marvel oeuvre. If you are absolutely starving for blockbuster action, it’s not a bad way to spend a few hours at the theater. If not, just catch it on VoD in a few months.
