Black Widow, review: has the flaw in Marvel movies finally been exposed?
Two years between sequels used to feel like the blink of an eye, but in Marvel terms, it’s an epoch. After the third phase of the comic-book franchise drew to a close a couple of summers ago, the series was set to take a 10-month holiday – which would have been its longest break from cinemas since the great spandex famine of 2012–13, when 364 agonising days passed between the release of Avengers Assemble and Iron Man 3. Yet thanks to a global crisis even Captain America and co couldn’t straighten out, this brief-ish hiatus ended up more than doubling in length, as fans were tided through the slough by various tie-in shows on the Disney+ streaming service which delved into finer points of multiverse lore.
Black Widow, which both arrives in cinemas and launches as a premium title on Disney+ next week, is as close to a fresh start as Marvel is ever likely to make. Largely unfolding in the period of crime-fighting downtime that followed 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, it’s a standalone adventure which follows Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff on a personal errand to bring down the Red Room: not the fluffy bondage chamber from 50 Shades of Grey, but a sadistic Russian training programme for female assassins, of which Natasha herself is an unhappy alumna.
Directed by Australia’s Cate Shortland, the film plays like Mission: Impossible-lite – think espionage, intrigue, double-crosses, flawless rubber masks, furniture-splintering scraps, and a motorcycle chase through the boulevards and alleys of a picturesque European capital (in this case, Budapest). For the most part it’s as briskly enjoyable as the studio’s output tends to be, with likeable characters trading polished repartee while large computer-generated objects explode convincingly in the background.
Yet perhaps for the first time, the briskness often doesn’t sit right with the material at hand. “Girls are the only natural resource the world has too much of,” snarls the evil spymaster Dreykov (Ray Winstone) in reference to the ready global supply of potential recruits for his regiment of abducted and brainwashed female operatives. The line is sufficiently blood-curdling to make you gulp – especially when growled by Winstone, who could make The Teddy Bears’ Picnic sound like a death threat.
But the film lacks either the nerve or the moral vocabulary to so much as spell out, let alone reckon with, the implications of his statement. Black Widow emphatically isn’t Red Sparrow, the 2018 thriller in which Jennifer Lawrence played a student of State School 4, the shadowy Soviet facility where vulnerable young women were inducted into a life of sexual espionage. For all the tough talk, Dreykov’s private army isn’t functionally different from any other blockbuster bad guy’s hit squad, while screenwriting contrivances such as his pheromonal force field – one whiff of which freezes would-be attackers in their tracks – feel like cheap substitutes for actual human psychology. The film plainly wants the extra shot of gravitas that comes with serious, real-world resonance, but isn’t prepared to do the legwork to earn it.
The limitations of the Marvel franchise when it comes to addressing certain subjects and story types have always been dimly apparent, but Black Widow’s coyness around its central premise is an exposing moment. It’s far more comfortable playing its heroine off against a new rota of sidekicks – especially Florence Pugh’s bluntly hilarious Yelena Belova, another former Red Roomer gone renegade who is transparently being groomed for a recurring role in the films and series ahead.
Pugh and Johansson share a snappy chemistry that reminds you how much fun these films can be with the right stars in the right configurations – there’s a slick reunion scene in which the pair’s identical combat skills are crunchily put to the test, and a nice running joke about Natasha’s trademark slinky pre-combat crouch (Yelena isn’t a fan).
Rounding out the impromptu family of defectors and retirees are David Harbour’s Red Guardian, a washed-up Soviet rip-off of Captain America with ‘Karl Marx’ tattooed across his knuckles, and Rachel Weisz’s Melina, another Red Room graduate. This ragtag quartet work best together when they’re being kept busy: a reflective interlude at Melina’s remote cabin hideaway slows the film to a porridgey crawl, but the climactic secret base infiltration bounces along entertainingly, and the hot pursuit through Budapest ranks among the franchise’s most rip-roaring set-pieces. As tyres screech, absurdly attractive stars dispatch enemy goons and dialogue zings around like ricocheting bullets, you remember why this recipe has worked for so long. But after a break, its shortcomings are that bit more conspicuous.
Dir: Cate Shortland. Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Rachel Weisz, Ray Winstone, O-T Fagbenle. 12A cert, 133 mins
In cinemas now and on Disney+ from Friday July 9