When then-Marvel Entertainment CEO Ike Perlmutter penned an email in 2014 listing examples of failed super hero flicks that were female led, it’s not hard to imagine he was debating the value of adding a Black Widow solo film into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. At this point Black Widow had appeared in numerous MCU films, including Iron Man 2, The Avengers, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but had only been thinly sketched in the vein of your typical dangerous female assassin with a dark past.
It would be another five years from his email before the MCU’s first female superhero film, Captain Marvel, hit theaters, and a full seven years before Black Widow finally received her theatrical due. This glacial pace of so-called progressiveness is par for the course in the MCU, which has had no shortage of cringey moments of attempted diversity or solidarity that fall short of even basic expectations (no one can forget the MCU’s first openly gay character being, well, not a character).
Due to that glacial pacing, the Avengers films portraying Black Widow had already been put to rest before her first and only solo film could ever come out, and so had the character, leaping to her death in the Avengers’ final saga. Could a Black Widow film work this late in the game – after the hype of the Avengers “Infinity Saga” has died down, and after the character had already perished? It’s a stacked deck of circumstances working against the film to begin with, and unfortunately a mediocre script coupled with mediocre direction from Cate Shortland doesn’t do nearly enough to overcome them.
The first act of Black Widow, which was by far my favorite part of the film, opens with a scene that feels pulled directly from the TV show The Americans: a seemingly “normal” family of 4 living in Ohio find their world turned upside down when they must suddenly flee in the night. The family makes a narrow escape to Cuba, where we learn they are less of a family and more of a manufactured unit of spies sent from Russia. This manufactured family includes The Red Guardian, Alexei (David Harbour) as the father figure, Melina (Rachel Weisz) as the mother, and Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) as children caught in the circumstances.
After that we flash-forward to the events after Captain America: Civil War, where Natasha finds herself on the run and without her found-family of Avengers for friendship or support. Figures from her past lead her to track down the members of her short-lived Ohio family instead, as they take on a mission to dismantle the Black Widow recruitment program in Russia.
Black Widow has another objective beyond Johansson’s swan song – it acts as both a sendoff to Johannson’s portrayal of the character while passing the baton to a younger version of the hero in Florence Pugh’s Yelena. The second objective is the more successful of the two, if only because Pugh brings a far more charismatic and earnest approach to the character than Johansson’s stilted take. I’m interested in seeing her in the role, though not necessarily specifically or solely because of what I saw here.
On that first objective, though – giving the character a proper movie and a proper goodbye – Black Widow is a huge, missed opportunity. Eliciting comparison to the Jason Bourne films (they’re not my thing, but maybe they’re yours), Black Widow’s script doubles down on everything already established about Natasha instead of adding any new flavor or depth to her character. In Black Widow, Natasha is portrayed as a loner spy – check – who feels guilty about all the red on her ledger – check – who wants nothing more than to make up for her past deeds by working with her new, found family to fight evil – check. We’ve seen it before and there’s not much this film has to add to that, in spite of the 2 hours of opportunity the run time provides.
These problems are especially apparent in the smaller details of the film. The broad arc is pretty much what you’d expect from a smaller budget MCU film: thriller-esque vibes wrapped around some middling second unit action sequences, snarky banter, and a bloated third act. But while characters like Hawkeye are afforded secret, unexpected private lives revealed late in the game, and characters like Iron Man are granted rich personal details complete with plenty of friends, family legacies, and personal interests all along, Black Widow is largely constrained and defined by the scraps that came before.
Case in point: There are jokes and jabs throughout the film about the way Black Widow does sexy superhero poses while the world watches the Avengers save the world. Is she a hero? Or an actress? But while on the run and completely out of the public eye for the first time in years, we still see Natasha find the time to make or locate a skin-tight white catsuit for a sexy, terrain-coordinated look to don during their prison break. She’s alone, on the run, in a desperate state – will we never see this character just wear a pair of sweats, be a regular person, and call it a day? (Spoiler: No, we won’t.)
Black Widow bangs us over the head with the idea that Natasha values her personal freedom and wants every Widow, and nay, every woman, to be free to make choices and be themselves. But Natasha remains the paper-thin sketch of character she always was, relegated to a posthumous backdoor pilot of a sendoff, leaving us hoping they can get it right the next time.