BLACK WIDOW: Too Dark And Dull To Pop

Tonight, the first Marvel movie in two years hits the big screen, and Disney Plus:

BLACK WIDOW (Dir. Cate Shortland, 2021)

Since she was first introduced into the Marvelverse in IRON MAN 2 in 2010, Scarlett Johansson has portrayed the character of Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow seven times. This includes extended cameos in all of the AVENGERS films, the two CAPTAIN AMERICA movies, and an appearance in CAPTAIN MARVEL. So it seems fitting for her eighth time in the role in the 24th entry in the franchise be a feature-length showcase for Johansson’s interpretation of a killer comic character that dates back to 1964.

The movie starts off as an origin story, with the young Natasha, played by a blue-haired 13-year old Ever Anderson, living what looks like a conventional family existence in Ohio. But her sister, Yelena Belova (10-year old Violet McGraw), and their parents Alexei (Stranger Things’ David Harbour), and Melina (Rachel Weisz), have to abruptly leave their home because it turns out that they’re Russian spies, you know, like that FX show, The Americans.

As they make their getaway, Yelena requests that her favorite song, Don McLean’s “American Pie,” be played on the car stereo. Usually when a particular song that is significant to a character is played early in a movie, that means it will come up again in a meaningful way later.

So the unrelated family make their escape via a getaway plane with Harbour’s Alexei hanging on the wing amid gunfire. There’s some excitement here, but overall due to its strong familiarity this opening sequence is underwhelming. But just you wait because this film isn’t finished serving up underwhelming sequences!

Natasha and Yelana get sent to some scary dark facility, called the Red Room Academy where they are groomed to be assassins (I think so - like I said it was dark). 21 years later, as a title tells us, Natasha has now grown into Johansson, who we can see is a troublemaker who is again on the run, but this time it’s the FBI headed by General Thaddeus Ross (a digitally de-aged for some reason William Hurt).

Yelana, now grown up to be Florence Pugh, is a fast-acting trained killer like Natasha, who, after a fight on a bridge with an thickly-armed mystery figure named Taskmaster, tracks her sister in Budapest, and they immediately get into another of the film’s savage yet unengaging fight scenes.

Then there’s a motorcycle chase through the streets where the sisters are pursued by black-clad attackers, and Taskmaster pops up again in a tank. Following that MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE-style activity, Natasha and Yelana break their super soldier Dad (actually fake Dad), now sporting an exaggerated Russian accent, out of a Siberian Prison in one of the movie’s better sequences as involves a riot, helicopter acrobatics, and best of all, an avalanche.

Unfortunately, that’s followed by a drawn out family (actually fake family) reunion on fake mother Melina’s Russian pig farm. An attempt to explore the complex dynamic of these peoples’ relationships, this talky drama section lasts over 20 minutes long and is tediously dull. It maybe the most boring bit in the entire Marvel movie canon.

The finale concerns the faux family bonding together (or trying to) to take down the film’s real villain, Dreykov (Ray Winstone, also with a questionable accent), and destroy the Red Room program which has transformed scores of young girls into brainwashed Black Widows. This is where we get screen-filling explosions, more hand-to-hand combat, paratroopers firing machine guns in the sky, and plenty of strained superheroics.

Problem is not much of BLACK WIDOW worked for me. Perhaps I’m burned out on the whole Marvel franchise, but the formula fell flat, and while I appreciated that the filmmakers, including Director Cate Shortland, and screenwriter Eric Pearson, set out to make a gritty Marvel film, with little of the flashiness of the other entries, the way too dark picture just doesn’t pop.

I have loved many of Johansson’s performances, but there’s not much of a character here. She mainly comes off as cold and humorless, which could be said of the movie in general. Despite that Pugh, who was solid in MIDSOMMAR, has some good wisecracks, and enjoyably makes fun of Johansson’s fight pose established in her previous turns in the roles; and O-T Fagbenle (Elizabeth Moss’s husband in The Handmaid’s Tale Hulu series) has some amusing moments as a guy smitten with Johansson, there’s precious little humor here. This is the Marvel movie, I bet more than what's on the horizon, that will suffer the most from not being able to have a funny Stan Lee cameo.

Marvel fanatics will probably like BLACK WIDOW a lot more than me as it has a fair share of action (except for the extended dysfunctional fake family segment), and fills in some gaps in the franchise’s continuity. But I was largely bored with the 24th entry in the never-ending Marvel saga, and think I really need a break from these movies.

For those of you that are going to it no matter what, don’t forget to stay for the after credits bonus scene. Of course, if you’re one of those that are set on seeing this movie, you already know that drill.

More later...