'Black Widow' Isn't Just Another Superhero Movie
by EG
Disney's Marvel franchise is facing a turning point after the pandemic. With the wrap of the Avengers story arc, the comic-book movies have to decide whether they're going to stick to the formula that won the box office for more than a decade or move on to something new. One reviewer says that the next Marvel movie, Black Widow, takes a step in the direction of newness. Read on for details.
If the Avengers movies are broadly about a ragtag family of superheroes finding comradeship while forging an allegiance against evil, Black Widow is about another kind of alternate family, messed up by deceptions and bitter betrayals before rediscovering trust in an onslaught of explosive situations. Directed by Cate Shortland with propulsive excitement, humor and pleasingly understated emotional interludes, this stand-alone proves a stellar vehicle for Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff, given first-rate support by Florence Pugh, Rachel Weisz and David Harbour. Shifting away from the superhero template into high-octane espionage thriller territory, it makes a far more satisfying female-driven MCU entry than the blandly bombastic Captain Marvel.
Scripted by Thor: Ragnarok co-writer Eric Pearson from a story by Jac Schaeffer and Ned Benson, the plot is situated between the events of Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War. But it’s also sufficiently self-contained to work for anyone who hasn’t been keeping up with the Marvel Industrial Complex. A post-credits recruitment scene with a surprise cameo from a major-name star seen in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier indicates possible future installments that will bring at least one key character here back into the SHIELD-adjacent fold.
The attention-grabbing opening sequence starts out like a Terrence Malick remembrance of sun-dappled childhood before igniting into a suspenseful escape scene that might have been lifted from The Americans. The young Natasha (Ever Anderson) is a tomboyish preteen with a mop of acid-blue dyed hair, tooling around on her bicycle in the leafy Ohio town where she lives with her family in 1995. Her 6-year-old sister, Yelena (Violet McGraw) scrapes her knee and gets comforting kisses from their mother, Melina (Weisz), who reminds both girls, “Your pain only makes you stronger.” But the tender family scene is shattered when father Alexei (Harbour) returns home with news that they need to make a hasty exit.
Narrowly evading authorities and a barrage of gunfire, they fly to Cuba, where their identities as Russian intelligence agents posing as an American family are revealed before they are separated. Alexei expresses relief that his three years of thankless undercover obscurity are over, finally allowing the “Red Guardian” to get back to the super-soldier duties for which he was trained. But his boss, General Dreykov (Ray Winstone, with a dodgy Russian accent), seems more interested in the feisty spirit of Natasha, who is fiercely protective of her kid sister.
Get the rest of the review at The Hollywood Reporter.
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