Black Widow is 90 minutes of inspired storytelling, charming actors, and a surprisingly clever script. Unfortunately, the movie is two hours and 15 minutes long.
We live in the era of zombie IP, when content must persist and no character can ever die, no matter how thematically appropriate or narratively cathartic. Characters aren’t characters after all, they’re brands, assets in a corporate ledger. Who is Black Widow? Before now she was mostly the least super of the Avengers super team, a leather-clad jiu-jitsu assassin and tertiary hero, arguably the second least interesting of the bunch behind Hawkeye. If the Avengers was just a movie, or even two or three movies, that would be enough story for Black Widow (the character) and we could simply move on. (In fact, spoiler alert, she already died in Avengers Endgame).
But because The Avengers isn’t just a story, it’s an entire universe of content, Black Widow is more than just a side character. She’s an unmined tributary in a massive revenue stream now encompassing 24 movies. In that context, not to give us a whole standalone Black Widow movie would be like leaving money on the table. It would be considered a dereliction of duty to the shareholders.
The beauty of inspiration as it normally works is that one idea builds on another, again and again until the initial spark might not even be that important anymore. A good story outgrows its own elevator pitch. The IP model, in which “phases” of a larger universe are planned years in advance, before the screenwriters are even hired, constrains that kind of creativity, mandating that a particular movie exist within specifically-defined parameters outlined years earlier. If it outgrows its elevator pitch too well, the creatives will probably be replaced. No one silly story is worth jeopardizing the whole.
The upside is that Disney can afford the best writers, directors, and actors money can buy, and in Black Widow, it shows. With Black Widow’s story already bookended in previous movies, Marvel has brought in Florence Pugh from Midsommar to play Yelena Belova, Natasha Romanov’s younger sister, in a story about young Russian girls kidnapped from their families and trained as spy assassins.
The film opens in Ohio, where Yelena and Natasha (the latter of whom grows up to be Scarlett Johansson) are living with their parents. The four of them, Yelena, Natasha, Alexander, and Melina (David Harbour and Rachel Weiscz), make up a Russian sleeper cell. In the film’s opening scene, they’re forced to flee in the middle of the night one night in the early nineties, as “American Pie” plays softly on the stereo of their Ford Explorer.
Back in the “present,” Yelena discovers that she’s been brainwashed into assassindom, and most of the movie consists of her trying to get the fam back together to take down General Dreykov (Ray Winstone), the shadowy figure who brainwashed her. The portion of Black Widow that feels like an adult contemporary prestige TV show, a sort The Americans sequel event with a more complex mythology, works shockingly well. These actors are wonderful together and Pugh is the class of the bunch, and not just because she’s the only one of them that can convincingly perform a Russian accent.
David Harbour plays Alexei Shostakov, aka Red Guardian, a kind of Cold War foil for Captain America with a goofy red suit and “KARL MARX” tattooed on his knuckles (which is sort of conflating the Soviet period of Russian history with the ’90s gangster era of Russian history, which are two different things, but okay). He’s been in prison since the ’90s but still dines out on his old war stories, like the time he almost beat up Captain America. When his daughters bust him out of prison he takes perverse pride in their traumatic histories, bellowing, “How many people have you killed? Your ledgers must be dripping, just gushing red.”
Harbour, Pugh, Johansson, and Weisz have real chemistry, and Black Widow, directed by Aussie indie director Cate Shortland from a script by Eric Pearson, has probably the most effective, actual adult comedy of any Marvel movie up until this point. The movie about this family of ex-spies trying to come to grips with their pasts and figure out where they stand with each other is a great one.
Then about 90-100 minutes into the movie it seems to remember that it’s supposed to be a tributary again and takes the action up to a secret base in the clouds to merge with the Marvel machine. An eight-figure CGI extravaganza ensues, and for all that money the most entertaining thing about it is listening to Ray Winstone try to do Russian gangster and Cockney thug simultaneously.
To ask “why did they have to do this?” about the convoluted and kind of dull finale sequence would be disingenuous, as the obvious answer is “because that’s why the movie exists in the first place.” The beauty and the sorrow of Marvel movies is that they can be so great before the black SHIELD SUVs show up, but the black SHIELD SUVs will always show up.
It can be fun to watch talented creators and artists put their own stamp on the material, but it can never be that deep of a stamp. With the right team, these standalone stories can be easy to enjoy, right up until the point when the larger universe asserts priority. Which feels a bit like “Fun’s over, the teacher’s here.”
There’s probably an essay to be written about the way corporate fads have turned adult storytelling into the kids in this scenario, and comic book plots into the unfun vice principal, but we’ll save that for another time.
“Black Widow” launches simultaneously in theaters and on Disney+ with Premier Access in most Disney+ markets on July 9, 2021. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.