Movie Review: Black Widow

Official Poster for Black Widow Movie

Scarlett Johansson's sensuous cough-syrup purr is something I've missed in lockdown, but it's back with a throaty vengeance in the highly enjoyable standalone episode for which her character Black Widow was long overdue. WandaVision creator Jac Schaeffer co-wrote it, and Cate Shortland directed it with gusto, with touches of Terminator 2 and Mission: Impossible but unmistakably keeping the tonal consistency of a typical MCU melodrama.

This film tells the origin story of Black Widow's presence in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, involving a family trauma, identity crisis, and sibling rivalry with a pugnacious kid sister, Yelena, played entertainingly by Florence Pugh. Yelena can't help but laugh at and possibly envy Black Widow's balletic fight stance, which includes absurd posing and resembles the mane-tossing antics of a woman in a shampoo commercial.

Alexei is proud to be the first Soviet-sponsored super soldier, dubbed "Red Guardian" and sporting a knockoff superhero outfit, and tragically obsessed with someone he considers to be his opposite number, Captain America, in what he quaintly refers to as the "geopolitical stage of international conflict." His masters have now suppressed the truth about his superheroism and abandoned him in a decaying prison, where he passes the time by challenging fellow convicts to arm-wrestling matches.

The family's life in the American heartland is doomed, and they must now face the evil puppetmaster Dreykov (Ray Winstone), who has been training an emotional zomboid army of "widows," of which the two girls were originally a part. He has control over their minds, but he also has a stash of glowing-red antidote phials that could restore these young women's independence, and these, of course, take on MacGuffiny significance so much so that we have to wonder about the wisdom of creating the phials in the first place.In that decade, Dreykov appears to have had a very specific political connection: there's a picture of him with Bill Clinton, which seems a little harsh on that president which surely a villain as cunning as Dreykov would have cultivated links with the Bush family as well.

Natasha and Yelena must face Dreykov, who has good reason to despise Natasha an aspect of Black Widow's personality that isn't fleshed out as convincingly as it could be but first they must sort out their differences, and there are some impressive bone-crunching close-quarter martial-arts fight scenes between the two of them.

The bond between Black Widow and her preposterous old father, who is very large, prone to fits of rage, and enjoys smashing things, is the most teasingly potent relationship revealed here. Is this a Freudian clue to Black Widow's attraction to Dr. Bruce Banner, the Hulk's alter ego? This glimpse into her troubled mind alone is worth the price of admission.

This episode is great fun for fans of Black Widow and everyone else, and Harbour could easily ascend to spinoff greatness of his own.