Movie Breakdown: Black Widow (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
I’ve been living off the inconsistent drips and drabs of Marvel Television for too long! Give me the big-budget promise of a true entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe! Give me Black Widow!
Post-Screening Ramble:
After months and months and months of slowly ingesting tiny chunks of Disney+ provided MCU lore while the internet scrabbled and fought to decipher the smallest detail, clamoring for it all to mean something, it is good to be back in the big budget fold of an overlong, slightly bloated, entirely entertaining Marvel film. Black Widow is a solid entry into the more ground level world of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Scarlett Johansson (in what purports to be her last appearance as the formerly brain-washed assassin) plays Black Widow in this prequel – set just after the events of Civil War – that follows Natasha Romanoff as she flees the American government only to be caught up in the machinations of her own past. It is, for forty minutes of the too long two and half hour runtime, a solid espionage thriller in the vein of Winter Soldier or even The Bourne Identity. Director Cate Shortland infuses every fight scene with bone-crushing verve, and I cringed and grimaced as Johansson took some truly hard looking hits. This is a film about dealing with the trauma of your past, of reconnecting with your family, of staring down the abusers who hurt you. It is a lot of things, too many things even, and probably somewhere between the sitcom-y middle section where Romanov finds her family – Florence Pugh, David Harbour and Rachel Weitz all chewing scenery like the pros they are – and thirty minutes of action sequences that close the film, some subplot or thematic resonance or battle could’ve been clipped to give everyone a little room to breath. But in the end, the bloat feels well-intentioned, the action sequences as impressive as Marvel makes them and everything in between feels familiar in the very best way.
One Last Thought:
The end of the credits is scant but opens the door wide to … well, a lot of different things. And I’m curious to see them all.
