The Doctor’s Diagnosis: B
On one hand, I’m ecstatic to finally see Black Widow in theaters. Why? Because I psychologically couldn’t handle seeing the trailer anymore. As one of the high-profile releases delayed an entire year by the pandemic, I have seen Black Widow’s trailer every fucking week for the last year and a half (barring when the theater was closed, of course). I knew every word of the trailer by heart and it has become an unwanted, permanent fixture in my brain alongside the words to every song from Les Miserables (long story). On the other hand, I never thought that this character, like Hawkeye, was strong enough to carry a movie on her own. I’m happy to say that 1. I won’t ever watch that trailer again and 2. I was wrong. Black Widow is far from perfect, but it is in my upper echelon of Marvel movies and, despite serious flaws, is an overall good time.
Black Widow (played again by Scarlett Johansson) died in Avengers: Endgame (sorry, spoiler alert for my parents and the other three people on earth that haven’t seen it), so this is obviously a prequel. Taking place after Captain America: Civil War, the film sees Black Widow reconnect with her (sort of) family and attempt to hunt down the man behind the so-called red room, a training facility that turns young women into brainwashed assassins. As a reformed graduate of the red room herself, Black Widow discovers that her prior attempt to destroy the facility failed and she pledges to end it once and for all.
While Marvel movies typically follow the same basic, McGuffin-based plot, I have admired how the tone of this plot has changed based on a film’s particular characters. From the zany sci-fi of Guardians of the Galaxy to the espionage of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the filmmakers manage, to varying degrees of success, to make the formula feel different. Black Widow is one of the more successful entries in this regard and is one of the more serious films in the universe (with “serious” being a relative term). Although it often feels too much like The Winter Soldier, the film’s undertones of human trafficking and sense of legitimate human consequences make it feel more gritty than most Marvel entries (seemingly emphasized by the opening credits featuring an emo version of Smells Like Teen Spirit, which is about as redundant as doing a country version of Take Me Home, Country Roads). There are moments when it almost feels more akin to Craig-era Bond movie than a superhero film. Almost.
The problem is that those moments are typically sabotaged by an insistence on reverting to the formula. Like a recovering alcoholic slipping off the wagon, Black Widow can’t help but periodically abandon its charms in favor of needlessly overblown, generic and cartoonish action scenes. To keep the Bond comparison alive, it feels like License to Kill and Moonraker spliced together into one film and the goofiness of the later betrays the gravitas of the former. I was only mildly annoyed by this until the seemingly endless final act featuring an aerial battle in a sky fortress that (aside from amusingly ripping off a plot point from Robocop) feels like it is from a different, shittier film.
This may seem odd, but I’ll compare it with another comic-based movie: the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Despite being a film about mutant, pizza-loving turtles fighting a clan of ninjas, the original (1990) movie is almost oddly serious. While there are certainly plenty of jokes, the violence is taken seriously and people (including kids and the heroes) are badly hurt. The finale isn’t a grand, frantic action scene, but rather a fight on a rooftop that ends with the villain being flat-out murdered by being crushed in a garbage truck. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a film doesn’t mind being grounded and doesn’t think that it needs an enormous chase scene every 20 minutes to keep its audience’s attention. I wish that Black Widow had the conviction of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I wish that it knew that it didn’t need to periodically become a cartoon. I wish it knew that the final battle could be gritty and didn’t need a ridiculous mid-air gymnastic battle. I wish it didn’t need to periodically remind us that, yes, we are watching a Marvel movie.
When the film thrives, though, is during the character moments when the script is allowed to breathe between action sequences. The characters, performances and chemistry are fantastic. The interactions between Black Widow and her sister (played by Florence Pugh) are the best part of the film and they play off each other with the sincerity and familiarity of actual siblings. In a film filled with car chases and explosions, it’s moments like a conversation about a jacket and Pugh’s criticism of Widow’s battle poses that will remain in my memory (along with every line from the goddamn trailer). I typically hate comic relief characters in Marvel movies, but David Harbour (as the father/the Red Guardian) brings much more to the table than, say, Michael Pena in Ant-Man. Often a complete prick and often a comedian, Harbour is sometimes over the top, but also knows when to reign it in for moments that feel surprisingly bittersweet. Rachel Weisz is given the least interesting material as the mother figure, but makes the most of it by conveying a woman torn between family and professional obligation with a level of earnestness usually reserved for more serious fare. Taken together, these characters form a dysfunctional family that can alternate between funny, sweet and heartbreaking without skipping a beat and it’s in these scenes that Black Widow finds its stride. Too bad those scenes are always interrupted by generic stormtroopers that need to remind us that there hasn’t been a motorcycle chase in a while.
Speaking of generic villains, Taskmaster is fucking garbage. Without going into spoilers, this version of Taskmaster is, um, different from the comic book version. Reduced to a silent, mindless assassin, Taskmaster is about as boring and forgettable as villains get in this sort of film. The film can’t even be bothered to incorporate his main ability into the film. We are reminded about 20 times that Taskmaster can perfectly duplicate the fighting style of an opponent, but want to know how many times this ability actually comes up in the film? None. Zero. Not fucking once does this actually happen. Did the screenwriter just forget to include it? I honestly have no idea why this character was even called Taskmaster; it could have just as easily been some nameless ninja without changing anything and without irritating me.
Black Widow feels like a great movie that was downgraded to a good movie by studio notes. There are times when the performances and the banter and chemistry between the actors is so good that I was hoping that the main plot would just go away and leave me watching these people just hanging out together. There are other times when the film starts feeling truly unique and then sacrifices everything for CGI car crashes. It’s frustrating, but there is enough great stuff here to at least marginally overcome the lame, obligatory stuff. It’s enough that I hope to get more movies with these characters in the future and Marvel keeps Black Widow around for a long time…..shit.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Widow_(2021_film)#/media/File:Black_Widow_(2021_film)_poster.jpg
