Hello Fellow Journeyers,
This review is a bit of a backwards look at a movie that I saw in May 2021. After many years of being a secondary character, Black Widow finally gets her debut as a frontrunner in this hotly anticipated movie from early spring 2021.
What's the story about: Black Widow takes place in the time gap between Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War where many characters like Captain America, Falcon, and Black Widow find themselves on the wrong side of the law and are on the run. Black Widow specifically follows Natasha Romanoff on a covert mission that finds herself tracing back her origins as an assassin under the Widow Program in order to stop a new threat that could jeopardize the world.
Black Widow had a lot working against itself from the beginning. To start with, taking place retroactively after she dies in Avengers: Endgame just seems like poor planning on Marvel Studios' part and should've been done years before. It was meant to be a proper send off for a beloved character from years of following her, but ends up feeling more shoehorned in than anything. First of all, the timeline makes little to no sense that while Black Widow is on the run from the governments of the world, she would take on her own personal mission without the help of Captain America or Falcon. While the characters that she does find to help her work well enough where they are, it still feels like the overarching connection to the Marvel universe was just forgotten.
Secondly, the idea that an origin story for a superhero that has been around for eight years already seems to have been lost on the writers and the story. They try to fit in a short prologue to establish where Natasha comes from but it barely works, even if the introduction is one of the finer points of this mostly discombobulated mess of a movie. From the get go, there are too many questions constantly being posed to the audience with little to no sort of answers that come in a satisfying or even necessary manner. Throughout the first two acts, you watch as Natasha brings together a group of heroes, but the why of it is just left dangling while the first half of the movie takes its time expositioning everything.
By the third act, everything that has not made sense up until this point comes to a head with little emotional resonance or resolve, but has some fun and cool action pieces that makes you think going to the theater may have been worth it after all. Throughout the movie, action scenes happen often and are grandiose, but with the poor plotting and corny dialogue, the third act ends up just being for kicks much like Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker's third act was. At this point, you're just wanting to find something to latch onto that is enjoyable to watch when the last two hours go by with little storytelling actually happening.
Final Verdict: ★★ 2 Stars - Black Widow should have been good and could have been better, had it been directed and penned by the Russo brothers and if it had been made years earlier. Unfortunately, the weight of the previous Marvel movies that included all of Black Widow's great character moments get lost on this movie's need to tell a unique story and include three extra characters that weren't really worth including. There is good action here, but with great actors playing parts that were just not well thought through. The story makes little sense and does not do this beloved character the proper justice she deserved.