Black Widow

No one will ever mistake Black Widow for being one of the classic entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it is a lot of fun, and finally gives Scarlett Johansson a chance to stand out in her own movie in this franchise.  After the non-stop idiocy that F9 gave just a couple weeks ago, all I wanted was some competently done action, and maybe some characters I could give a damn about.  This movie succeeds effortlessly at both noble goals.

Here is an action movie that is not just thrilling, but actually feels energized.  It's got thrilling stunts, as is to be expected, but they feel like the actors are actually performing them most of the time.  It has one liners that don't seem lame.  It has a pulse, and a source of life.  In other words, it feels like this is a movie the cast and crew actually wanted to make, instead of a contract negotiation that so many failed Summer blockbusters feel like.  It does so by filling in some intriguing background information on Johansson's character, and introducing us not just to where she came from, but the people who surrounded her before she entered the Marvel Universe.  It's an effective enough of a hook to carry us through the film's numerous action scenes, so that the audience's eyes don't glaze over when another explosion or car chase shows up.  Director Cate Shortland (an indie filmmaker making a successful transition to mainstream Hollywood for once) and veteran Marvel Universe screenwriter Eric Pearson show expertise with this kind of material, and the cast is more than capable of pulling it off.

In the film, we learn that when Natasha (Johansson) was a little girl, she lived in Ohio with her younger sister Yelena (played as an adult by Florence Pugh), and parents Alexei (David Harbour) and Melina (Rachel Weisz).  Turns out "mom" and "dad" were really Russian spies, and that the girls were being prepared to enter a Super Soldier program in order to become Black Widows, soulless assassins who work for a shadowy boss known as Dreykov (Ray Winstone).  We know that Natasha eventually broke free from the deadly program, and went on to become an Avenger.  This film is set in 2016, after the events of Captain America: Civil War, and finds her in hiding from her own government, when she is forced to confront her own past.

Yelena has now been broken free from the Black Widow program as well, thanks to a special gas-like substance that can free the Widows from their programmed assassin training.  She needs to find a way to free all the other women, and wants Natasha's help in doing so, given her past heroics.  The two sisters go on a world-spanning adventure that will find them breaking their father Alexei (who prefers to go by his costumed superhero identity, the Red Guardian) out of prison, and reuniting with Melina, who is living a solitary life away from her violent past.  There is also a new supervillain introduced known as the Taskmaster, who participates in a lot of the film's action scenes, and can mimic the fighting style of anyone, but never gets to make much of an impression as you would like.  As is often the case with a lot of the Marvel Movies, the villains are the weaker element compared to the heroes here.

Still, Black Widow works mainly on the strength of the action, the chemistry of its lead cast, and the fact that this is a simple story that is told in an expertly handled way.  There's very little filler as the movie deftly shifts from one sequence to the next, and despite having a running time that stretches past two hours, seldom if ever slows down.  It serves as a wonderful entry that is centered on Natasha, gets us excited for what role Yelena will play in future entries of the Universe, and works well enough as a standalone film so that the audience feels fulfilled when it's done.  I know it sounds odd to praise a film for having a self-contained story, but with so many blockbusters these days focused only on setting up sequels, that is a rare thing in a movie such as this.  We get some definite possibilities here, but we still feel like we've gotten a complete movie, and not just a tease.

The film also finds plenty of time for humor (mostly provided by Pugh and Harbour), some important character building, and a bit of future world building, with the film's after credit scene hinting at where the story is going to go from here.  If anything, it gets you excited for where Pugh is going to take her character.  In a short amount of time, she has impressed me greatly in other films like Fighting with My Family and Midsommar, and here she gets to show that she's just as capable of not only playing a vital role in someone else's franchise, but carrying it on in the future.  Her inclusion here is to show her potential to the fans, and she does a fantastic job of doing just that.  Like her co-stars, she gives a performance that is able to ground the film in a small bit of reality that finds the humanity in a movie where the characters are bringing down floating villain fortresses, and diving through the skies.

And that has always been the key to the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in my eyes.  For all of its world-shattering stakes, the characters at the center of it were always what drew me in.  Black Widow proved to me that there is still plenty of that humane essence at play here.  If F9 was just technical wizardry run amok at the hands of a screenplay that seemed like it were written by a madman, then this is the simple, tightly-edited, well-paced, and enjoyable antidote that I badly needed.

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