Black Widow is a rare Marvel production, a film that—while still very much tethered to the rest of the franchise’s sprawling mythology—mostly operates as a standalone adventure, one almost incapable of setting up a direct sequel. That’s because the title character, the brainwashed assassin turned resourceful Avenger played by Scarlett Johansson, is dead in the present-tense timeline of the Marvel films. Black Widow is a prequel of sorts, and an origin story, a robust and satisfying glimpse into a defining interlude in Black Widow’s life that almost, almost pulls off the trick of being wholly its own thing.
Which may be faint praise, a hop over the low bar for discrete storytelling that Marvel has set for itself. But at a time when even the better, more inventive Marvel properties—chiefly the Disney+ series WandaVision—have ultimately played as mere bridge content to something else, Black Widow’s relative isolation comes as a welcome change of pace. Of course, the company can’t resist some kind of synergy, but that really only arrives in a post-credits sequence. Otherwise, Black Widow is simply a fun, occasionally poignant globe-trotting adventure, one that puts a reliable character to good use and introduces—somehow rather organically—her replacement.
Sometime around 2016, Natasha Romanoff has found herself on the lam from the U.S. government, the Avengers scattered to the winds after the calamitous events of (I’m pretty sure) Captain America: Civil War. How exactly she returned to lone wolf status isn’t really important. The film, directed with flinty style by Cate Shortland, quickly fixes up Natasha with a new partner: another traumatized graduate of the compulsory-attendance Russian assassin school called the Red Room. She’s Yelena, a blunt and wisecracking toughie played by the great Florence Pugh—an actor whose star has swiftly risen one beguiling screen turn after another. I had some concerns about an actor of her promise, her range and idiosyncratic taste, getting tractor-beamed into the Marvel universe. But Pugh allays much of those worries (for now) with a nimble, conscious foray into maximalism.
She and Johansson groove well, Johansson passing the batons (which are armed with electric charges) to a new enlistee as she hangs up the bodysuits and heads off into career freedom. It’s a winning exchange, made all the more so by the complicated, intriguing dynamic between Yelena and Natasha. As kids, they were the prop children of two Russian spies (David Harbour’s Alexei and Rachel Weisz’s Melina) infiltrating the U.S. Once the mission was over, the two girls were tossed back into the Red Room program, the sweet and comforting domestic life they had in Ohio reduced to a tragic ruse. That lost existence still haunts them—Yelena wants the fantasy back, while Natasha seems to wish it had never happened.
In that psychological space, Shortland and the film’s writer, Eric Pearson (WandaVision writer Jac Schaeffer and Ned Benson receive story credit), find opportunities to mull over issues of consent and bodily autonomy. Those topics are presented allegorically and quite literally as the film’s comic-book-y, sci-fi tropes come to bear on the story. Shortland and her actors find the right balance of humor and pathos, staging one particularly engaging and odd scene in which the pseudo family is reunited, falling back into cozy bickering and nagging even while discussing the sinister, world-threatening things that forced them into false domesticity to begin with.
When those threats become actual and immediate, Shortland sharply renders the danger. Her action scenes have both gnarly, intimate crunch and dizzyingly zoomed-out sweep. The film is as exciting when it’s two people fighting in a dingy Budapest apartment as it is when it’s gone grand and fiery and skyborn. The physics are different here than in other Marvel movies, more finely attuned to the hardness and weight of things. It all feels a bit more real, I suppose, even when Natasha is accomplishing superhuman feats of endurance and agility.
The sorry thing of the film, really, is that this needn’t have been a Marvel movie at all. Divorced of its duties to superhero lore, Black Widow would still be a sufficiently deft spy caper, confidently crafted and worthy on its own terms. And yet it wouldn’t exist without the long and diligent work of Johansson and Kevin Feige’s project. Even a canny genre movie like this had to be tied to the biggest I.P. of them all to get made.
It’s also a little grim, maybe, that Marvel was so intent on swapping out Natasha for such a similar (but younger!) new character, perhaps revealing the limits of the franchise’s ability to conceive of female heroes. But I also get it. Natasha is (was?) a good character, and Pugh more than makes the case for continuing that legacy. It’s unclear what awaits Yelena or any of the other shaggy folks we meet in this film (Weisz and Harbour acquit themselves gamely, too). Maybe a lot; maybe only ancillary sideline work until they get their own show in, say, 2027. Whatever happens to these collaborators in the gleaming and looming future of Phase 4 and beyond, they will at least have this sturdy and efficient film to point to whenever someone asks them what such capable people are doing working for the machine.
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June 29, 2021 at 11:00PM
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‘Black Widow’ Review: A Film That Does What Few Marvel Movies Can - Vanity Fair
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