Review - Black Widow (and then Wandavision, The Falcon and The Winter Soldier and Loki too, why not?)
Black Widow is the hotly awaited solo film of Black Widow, a character who has been dead for over two years now. I bring this up at the start because it helps foreground the weird place the MCU finds itself in currently. After the pandemic shuttered most cinemas and film sets for the majority of 2020, studios have been working with a mix of productions finished during COVID (more on them in a bit) and productions that have been sitting on a shelf gathering dust. Black Widow is the latter, originally supposed to be released in the spring of 2020, now here in the summer of 2021. It feels exactly like it's been on a shelf somewhere, and that colours so many of my thoughts towards it. This feels like the exact wrong time for a movie about Black Widow, a step back while the TV branch of the MCU is attempting (again, more on that later) to push this universe forward.
Paramount among the reasons this feels like a film that was meant to come out years ago is that it's set in between Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War. Natasha Romanoff is on the run from the government for breaking the Sokovia Accords and while hiding, she meets back up with her former "family". The inverted commas there are complicated, but essentially she was taken from her real family and raised in a family unit that were actually a group of spies in America working for the Soviet Union. Something like that, I think. The point is, they're the closest Nat has ever had to a family before joining the Avengers, so her surrogate sister is pretty much her sister, you get the picture.
I watched this film a week ago and it has not exactly had staying power.
This is the bit where I should describe the plot, but I am drawing a blank. I watched this film a week ago and it has not exactly had staying power. I remember there being something about trafficking women and some macguffin gas that stops spies being evil, but that's it. IMDb lists the plot as "Natasha Romanoff confronts the darker parts of her ledger when a dangerous conspiracy with ties to her past arises" and that vague description is little help too. Basically there's some stuff about family, some over the top action scenes and an attempt at building in real emotion, all done with much less sincerity and believability than the Fast and Furious movies.
Black Widow is done with much less sincerity and believability than the Fast and Furious movies.
The performances of Black Widow are one of the highlights of the film, when they're allowed to breathe at least. As the titular Widow, Scarlett Johansson returns and is just okay. I like her as an actress, but this role has never brought out her best and so it continues here. Fortunately, she is often sharing the screen with queen of my heart, saviour of cinema as an art, Florence Pugh. Pugh plays Yelena, the surrogate sister of Nat, and where half of this film is a send off for Black Widow, the other half is a set-up for Yelena's future in the MCU. I wish Pugh would stick to more interesting roles like in Little Women or The Little Drummer Girl or one of her many other films where she isn't little, but I suppose the kind of money that a role like this offers her can also offer her the security and notoriety to feel more comfortable headlining smaller films.
Supporting them are a cast that includes the wonderful David Harbour, who is doing the best with the role he has. Harbour has spent decades making films, but really marked himself out in the last five years as playing likeable charismatic father figures. You've seen Stranger Things, I've seen Stranger Things, you know what I mean. He's done other films about people with super powers like Suicide Squad or Hellboy, but he's wisely not sticking too close to his characters from there. Harbour's role is simple but underused, like those of most others in the supporting cast. See also Rachel Weisz and Ray Winstone, who turn up for a handful of scenes, attempt accents to various degrees of success and then disappear until they maybe return for a future MCU project. They're by no means bad, just not here long enough to work out what they're doing.
You're here for the action and let me tell you, it is rubbish. Genuinely. Total pants.
Being a big blockbuster film though, you don't really care about the actors (unless you also have an unstoppable crush on Florence Pugh). No, you're here for the action and let me tell you, it is rubbish. Genuinely. Total pants. Know that this is coming from a scholar of the Fast and Furious films when I say that it is total CGI rubbish. The characters are no longer characters and simply blend into CGI puppets to be thrown about by CGI rubble while being shot at by CGI bullets. In these moments, I became totally unengaged, as I do in many generic MCU fight scenes. Every now and then they get a great one, but otherwise they're poor action scenes in a world where Mission Impossible: Fallout and Mad Max: Fury Road exist. Even in a time when F9 is also in cinemas, that's at least a film that doubles down on nonsense, never requiring you to take it too seriously. Black Widow remains regrettably wedded to seriousness for all of its action scenes.
I found myself asking throughout Black Widow "why?" As in, why are we doing this? Why should I care? Why this film at this time? I struggled to find any answers beyond mild lip service to progressive politics and the money that lip service can bring. If you're big into the MCU, this will keep you satisfied, but as someone who feels burnt out by Marvel, I found it a step backwards when I instead want to see what's next. That's why I give Black Widow a
Black Widow is only one arm of what the MCU has done this year though, as it has expanded out into television. I've also seen them and have thoughts, so here they are quickly. I'm going to go through them in order and with mild spoilers so I can properly explain myself. If you want to avoid the spoilers, know that Loki I highly recommend, Wandavision I recommend lightly and The Falcon and The Winter Soldier I don't.
Wandavision
Wandavision was the first of this batch of MCU shows and it is an example of how this format does and doesn't work. On the one hand, its homages to television shows past are entertaining and help to build a brilliant air of mystery, as well as give an excuse to play a Beach Boys song (always a win in my books). On the other, it all eventually collapses into CGI nonsense after such restraint and gives us answers that are far less satisfying than we may have expected. Olsen is great, Bettany is even better, but I do not want another one of these projects to end with two colour swapped version of the same character model fighting in the sky. Wandavision kept threatening to be something exciting and was compelling while that threat lingered, but was ultimately revealed to be hollow when its promises fell flat.
The Falcon and The Winter Soldier
I've had a feeling that since the MCU got its cosmic nonsense out, it's a very hard thing to get back in the bottle. As such, grounded projects like Black Widow or this hunk of shit fail to excite me. In the case of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, it also fails because of its limp wristed attempts to dive into politics. I'm happy for superhero shows to get political, something like The Boys is all the better because of it, but Disney is unable to take anything other than a bland centrist stance. Any gesticulations towards the radical have to be shut down as violently as possible, lest they alienate members of their audience. Surround the half baked political stance with often nauseating action scenes and dialogue so clunky that it would make Neil Breen cringe, you have a six hour time sink that feels to me like the worst thing the MCU has yet produced.
Loki though, is a show that delighted me completely. It starts as a riff on the excellent The Good Place, before taking that shows unpredictability to temporal lengths. Each of the three main characters have chemistry to die for, the production design feels properly special and it's the only MCU thing that has music I can actually hum after the show ends. Admittedly, I was excited early on with what promised to be a low stakes, timey wimey diversion, but its final episode set up a future I can't wait to head into. If Black Widow felt like a step back for the MCU, Loki feels like a step forward. Thank God it's the only one of these shows to be confirmed for a second season, it's the world I most want to spend more time in. If the MCU has more of this and less of Falcon, I'm excited. Why not push this ridiculous universe to limits more ridiculous than many mainstream franchises ever tease?
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