By Rubén Rosario
The past year and change has felt like an extended case of déjà vu for many of us. The lockdown months and their immediate aftermath brought a steady diet of Turner Classic Movies marathons and pandemic-driven news cycles for this critic. But the rinse/repeat broken record was interspersed with something else: trailers for delayed tentpole titles promising a reprieve from the grim outlook that 2020 too often provided.
Among the most highly anticipated was BLACK WIDOW, the long-gestating standalone feature for the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s butt-kicking heroine. It purported to be an overdue star vehicle for Scarlett Johansson’s haunted (and hunted) Natasha Romanoff, as well as a more grown-up brand of MCU adventure. The promotional materials certainly give off Jason Bourne vibes, suggesting a time out from the wisecracks, fanboy in-jokes, and the endless drone of the MCU oppressive worldbuilding and exhausting emphasis on thematic and aesthetic uniformity.
A guy can dream. Despite a committed overqualified cast and a hint of post-Cold War intrigue, the new(-ish) adventure is a bloated dud, a joyless mix of perfunctory action sequences and dysfunctional family drama. More disappointing, it squanders an opportunity for the MCU to make something that hews closer to the espionage genre, perhaps even a chance to strike a parallel with current U.S.-Russia tensions. Instead, it settles for a hamfisted takedown of toxic masculinity and the destructive toll it takes on women. There’s a somewhat intriguing allegory about control in here, but it’s buried underneath lackluster filmmaking and mind-numbing franchise housekeeping. The latter is understandable in a group outing like the AVENGERS movies, but it has no place in a solo story like this one.
The film’s prologue hints at the movie BLACK WIDOW could have been were its hands not tied. In an Ohio town circa 1995, a younger Natasha (Ever Anderson) and baby sister Yelena (Violet McGraw) are enjoying some picturesque suburban bliss with mom Melina (Rachel Weisz) and dad (David Harbour) Alexei. You might wonder what a Russian family is doing in the Midwest after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Alas, their all-American happiness is short-lived, and they soon find themselves fleeing their home in a capably staged sequence that plays like a cross between Sidney Lumet’s RUNNING ON EMPTY and THE INCREDIBLES. I’ll even let the on-the-nose use of Don McLean’s “American Pie” slide, So far, so good.
But it’s not just Natasha and her loved ones who have been compromised. It’s the film they’re in that soon finds itself bogged down with obligations to dot every “i” and cross every “t” to pass muster as a product of the MCU’s assembly line. The family reaches Cuba, where the girls discover their parents are not as protective as they ought to be. You brace yourself for the film’s portrayal of Natasha’s training and brainwashing, depicted briefly in AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, but it never comes.
Instead, director Cate Shortland jumps to a more recent, very specific moment in the adult Natasha’s life. How specific, you ask? So much so that screenwriter Eric Pearson has characters repeatedly make references to events that will jog viewers’ memories. Fine and dandy, but not when they’re being used as blunt instruments to ram references to other MCU movies down our throats. BLACK WIDOW is so busy pointing out its place in the MCU’s timeline that it leaves precious little time to explore its main character. You know, the one the movie is named after. We’re never able to get into Natasha’s head because the filmmakers only approach her past demons in relation to other characters and how they’re able to move the story forward.
Lost in all the shuffle is Johansson herself, who often comes across as stiff and disoriented. As a result, her co-stars seize the spotlight to such a degree that she’s frequently relegated to a team player in a story where she ought to be the one taking center stage, especially when taking into consideration the character’s ultimate fate. What might charitably be regarded as an act of generosity by Johansson toward her co-stars ends up leeching the film from having something resembling a distinctive personality. By contrast, WANDAVISION, despite suffering from similar MCU tie-in issues, at least gave Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch the opportunity to do a little soul searching.
But BLACK WIDOW largely denies that opportunity to its stoic do-gooder. This critic hoped the movie would come back to life once Natasha reconnects with the adult Yelena (MIDSOMMAR’s Florence Pugh). Instead, we’re subjected to the time-honored MCU ritual of the “good guys” tussling before deciding to join forces, a superfluous exercise that makes an already overlong movie even longer. Cue the by-the-numbers chase scenes and ho-hum hand-to-hand combat with shadowy figures, leading to revelations that feel inevitable. Pugh and Harbour are quite good here, despite being forced to say their lines with heavy accents. They’re also saddled with delivering the film’s feeble attempts at humor which, it bears pointing out, help contribute to a running time of about two hours and a quarter that, due to poor pacing, feels interminable.
Shortland, the Australian filmmaker behind the acclaimed World War II drama LORE (2012), and Pearson, an executive story editor in the (consistently good) AGENT CARTER TV series, should have been in a position to give Natasha a worthy sendoff. But BLACK WIDOW is a tentpole entry that’s just going through the motions in the most unimaginative way possible, leading to a climactic showdown that doubles as an indictment of the abuses women have suffered at the hands of powerful men. It could have been a poignant message, but it’s handled so clumsily that it makes the fan-service shoutout of Marvel heroines near the end of AVENGERS: ENDGAME feel subtle by comparison. There’s some over-the-top, sci-fi flavored mayhem near the end that at least tries to swing for the fences, but it’s too little too late.
BLACK WIDOW comes out in theaters more than a year after its COVID-delayed release date of May 2020, which makes it all the more dispiriting how weak the finished product is. Diehard fans will likely find Easter eggs and winking references to Marvel Comics and MCU content to pore over, but other moviegoers, as well as at-home consumers shelling out $30 to watch it on Disney Plus Premier Access, should be able to call this stultifying slog what it is: a terrible film and a waste of a good cast. These days, such blunt honesty might amount to an act of courage befitting this steadfast, selfless hero who’s trapped in a subpar showcase that lets her down, and us as well.