Review: Black Widow

Natasha's back and she's bringing her whole family for the ride. 

Sorry it took me so long to get around to this one. Loki took precedence, and then time just sort of got away from me, and suddenly it’s two months after Black Widow first premiered. My bad. Still, no time like the present to talk about a fun movie. I’ll just say now, if you haven’t seen it already, you should. It’s a fun little story filling in a small gap in the story of the MCU. But enough preamble, let’s get to it, shall we?

 

We open with Natasha Romanoff, aka the Black Widow circa 1995. She’s living with her family in Ohio. We’re first seen her and her younger sister Yelena Belova playing in their backyard before being called in for dinner by their mother Melina Vostokoff. They start having a pretty suburban dinner, when Alexei Shostakov, the family patriarch comes in and excitedly tells Melina that he got IT. The family makes a hasty exit, Natasha going to grab a photo album but Melina makes her leave it. They hurriedly but stealth-fully drive to a nearby airfield. As the girls get on the plane, Alexei shows off inhuman strength getting the plane ready. They take off, but police have arrived by this point. They take several shots at the plane, wounding Melina, but Natasha is able to take over and get the four of them out of there. They land in Cuba, where Alexei turns in a disk over to General Dreykov, their boss and doesn’t seem to notice Melina being carried off in a stretcher. Guards try to grab the two children, with orders to send Yelena to the Red Room for additional training. Natasha steals a gun and threatens everyone trying to touch her little sister. Alexei talks her down long enough to give her a knockout injection.

 

Black Widow had a hell of a week.

We jump to 2016, just after the Captain America: Civil War battle at the Leipzig/Halle Airport. Natasha is on the run from the US Government. US Secretary of State Thaddeus ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross is tracking her personally. They think they have her cornered, but Natasha had actually dropped her tracer in a bathroom and has instead escaped to Norway. Her contact, a fellow that is unnamed in the film but is called Rick Mason, set her up with a trailer and some supplies. Natasha settles in to hide for the foreseeable.

 

Meanwhile, her sister Yelena is still working for the Red Room. She is hunting a renegade Widow named Oksana with other Widows. Yelena kills Oksana, but gets a face full of Red Dust. The substance breaks the mind control that Yelena had been under up to that point. Yelena takes the antidote and sends it to Natasha’s safehouse in Budapest safehouse, where it’s forwarded by Mason to Natasha’s Norwegian safehouse with other mail.

 

Sometime later, Natasha is driving into town for supplies with the Red Dust in her truck when she’s attacked by an assassin in a skull face mask. The assassin, Taskmaster, shows off an impressive array of skills and weaponry as he tries to get the Red Dust from Natasha. Natasha forces Taskmaster back and is able to retreat. She heads out to her safehouse in Budapest, where she finds a recovering Yelena crashing. The two briefly fight before they realize who the other is and why they’re there. The two bond a little as this is the firsts time they’d seen each other in over twenty years. There’s kind of a cute but sad moment when Yelena says that she has kept the lie in her head that her family was still back in Ohio. Natasha, in Yelena’s fictional family, is married with kids. They end up being attacked by Taskmaster and a group of Widows. While escaping, Natasha learns that Dreykov, the leader of the Red Room is still alive and the program is still active. Natasha is in denial about this, as she had assassinated Dreykov in order for her to join SHIELD. She’s clearly haunted by the fact that Dreykov’s young daughter Antonia was also killed in the blast. Natasha and Yelena evade Taskmaster and escape. They get to Mason who supplies them with a helicopter.

 

Just a man on a trip with his girls. Kinda.

Natasha and Yelena fly out to a secret prison where Alexei is being held. They reason that their undercover dad was Dreykov’s #2, so he’ll know where the former Soviet General would be hiding. Alexei has gone through some extensive changes since we last saw him, growing a thick beard and is now covered in tattoos. We join him as he’s getting another on his back and is arm wrestling other inmates while telling them stories of him fighting Captain America. One of the other prisoners points out the timeline doesn’t add up as Alexei has been in prison since the mid-90s and Cap wasn’t taken out of the ice until 2010. Alexei breaks the dude’s arm and then goes to check his mail at the security desk. They’re eating cookies sent to the Red Guardian, but Alexei is allowed to keep the toy that came with it. He finds an earpiece in the toy and is told to get to the yard. He takes vengeance on the two guards for eating his cookies and after an elaborate escaped that ends with the prison being covered in snow by an avalanche reunites with his daughters. Man, that escalated quickly. They ask Alexei what he knows about the Red Room, but he claims to not know anything, but they could go look up Melina, whom survived her gunshot wounds and kept working with Dreykov while Alexei had been in prison. Alexie really wants to kill Dreykov, too, as the sob had him put in that hell hole prison to hide their covert operations together. Alexei is bitter about it, believing he, the Red Guardian, could have been bigger than Captain America. They fly, and are later forced to walk after their copter crashes due to an empty gas tank, to Melina’s farm. On the walk, Alexei asks Natasha if Captain America ever mentioned him, to which she scoffs and walks off.

 

They make it to the farm where Melina has been living. After we have kind of a cute domestic moment where it’s revealed that while they haven’t seen either Alexie or Melina in 20 odd years, they’re both ingrained enough in the younger women’s psyche as “parents” that they react to comments like “sit up straight” without thinking. Melina reveals that her work of the last few decades was on mind control. While they took a few years decoding and doing their own research on the disk that Alexie stole, they perfected a mind control technique that lets her completely control her pigs. She demonstrates by keeping her pig, named Alexie, from breathing. They all argue for a few minutes, where Natasha says something along the lines of “We were always a fake family,” to which Yelena admits that while she knew it was a lie she always WANTED it to be real. A sentiment that both parents reveal to be true of them as well. Alexie by remembering and singing “Bye, Bye Miss America Pie,” Yelena’s favorite song when he last saw her, and Melina by showing she saved the photo album that Natasha had attempted to grab. All the photos were faked, but were still happy.

 

I don't care what other people say, I love the design
of this version of Taskmaster.

Agents working for the Red Room start arriving, Melina revealing that she tipped Dreykov off to their location upon their arrival. They’re all captured and taken to Dreykov’s base, a flying fortress that just gives off the vibe of either a more advanced or alternate prototype to a helicarrier. Natasha and Alexie are put in cells, Yelena is taken to have her brain autopsied to see if they can find a way to counteract the Red Dust cure. Melina is taken to a private interview in Dreykov’s office. After a short conversation, it’s revealed that Melina had spilled the beans to Natasha just before the goons arrived, and the two had swapped places using that facemask mesh from Captain America 2. Natasha tries to kill Dreykov, but it’s revealed as part of Natasha’s Red Room programing can’t hurt Dreykov due to pheromone conditioning. Dreykov actually thanks Natasha for all she’s done, as she helped create the ultimate weapon. He has Taskmaster remover HER helmet and reveals that this version of the character is Antonia Dreykov. She was badly burned in the explosion that supposedly killed the Dreykovs, and suffered some unspecified brain damage. Dreykov implanted a chip in his daughter’s brain and used the technology of the Red Room to turn her into Taskmaster. Natasha tricks Dreykov into showing her his control system for the Widows and then breaking her nose, severing a nerve in her nasal passage to protect her from the pheromones and she attacks Dreykov, stealing his ring and starts downloading the Widow database as he escapes. Natasha’s family escapes their various bonds and they have to work together to disable the flying fortress, stop and cure the widows, kill Dreykov, and defeat Taskmaster. You’ll have to watch the movie to see how things turn out.

Nat is EXHAUSTED.

 

The good first. This was top tier Marvel in terms of casting. Scarlett Johansson kills it once against as The Black Widow, even with several other Widows vying for attention and the top spot. Florence Pugh is great as Yelena Belova. She’s a younger Black Widow, she’s been hurt and while she has her guard up for most of the film, you could see how much better she feels in those few minutes where she seems Alexei cared more about her than he let on back in the day. Speaking of, David Harbour was real fun as Alexei Shostakov. He’s very much a burnt out sportstar or musician, one that never got big but can’t let go of the idea that he’s just one big break from being discovered. The moment where he asks about Cap, when both he and Natasha know that Steve would have Zero idea who the Red Guardian is, was particularly well done with Scar Jo’s exasperation face. He came across as an absolute bastard for how removed he was from his daughters, but that does highlight how near and dear they must have been to his heart for him to remember that song without prompting that he’d only really heard in passing up to that point. He also has a really funny moment where he tries to see if Melina would be down to reenact the most “fun” part of their old assignment together. Horny Red Guardian is hilarious. Rachel Weisz was also amazing as the OG Widow Melina Vostokoff. Much like Harbour, she comes across as a bit of a monster for how detached she is from her kids and yet still able to do the “stop slouching” command that all mothers can pull off. But, again, that kind of highlights how important they were to her when she pulls out the album. Their history was a lie, they were a group of spies, but it’s clear that the elder spies loved the younger like their own children. This movie also passes the Bechdel Test. Most of the conversations are either between women or mix gender, hell I think there was only two dudes only conversations in the whole film.

 

I think the films main weakness is in the villain. Sure, Dreykov is played well by Ray Winstone, but he’s really just an evil exposition machine that only shows up in the third act. We could have used an earlier scene or two as he speaks with his Taskmaster or something earlier in the film. There are also a few hammy scenes that are just kind of cringy. Like this slowmo shot in the finale where Yelena tries to sacrifice herself to kill Dreykov. It just looks awkward.

 

I’ll talk about Taskmaster in a separate paragraph, as I don’t consider her bad but I do have some negative thoughts I want to talk about. On the one hand, I think this was a good reveal. For those who don’t know, in the comics Taskmaster is really Tony Masters. Antonia is a character made specifically for the film. In retrospect, the reveal was kind of obvious with how often they bring up Antonia before it, but I was still shocked with the reveal. The costume is padded enough that I’d have never guessed a woman was in the suit. The skills she showed off were interesting. She used the shield work of Captain America, the Claws of Black Panther, Hawkeye’s Archery, and Spider-Man’s acrobatics. But, I don’t think the powers were explained very well. It looks like her powers work on cybernetics and recordings in her suit, but it’s never explained as such. That and she kind of disappears after the second attack. We could have used another fight with her around when Alexei was broken out of prison or something. We needed more of her is my point. And, to anyone that is complaining that they didn’t get Tony Masters, I say, “Chill.” It’s totally possible to introduce him later, and I think is totally inevitable. Taskmaster is too versatile of a merc villain to not use in at least one of the shows or later movies. Or they’ll flush out Antonia now that her daddy’s mind control is out of the equation. Either way, I don’t think this is the last of Taskmaster.

 

Overall, this is a A- movie for me. There are enough negatives to keep it from a perfect grade, but the acting, action set pieces, and effects make sure it got 90% there. This was a fun story that fills in a minor timeline gap in the MCU for Natasha. It also builds into the next show, Hawkeye, as the post credit scene shows Yelena getting recruited by Countess Valentina Allegra de Fontaine recruiting her to hunt down Hawkeye, the “reason” Natasha died. This actually might be what lead to the legal trouble that Disney is now facing with Scar Jo. If you’ve been living under a rock for the last month, Scar Jo is suing Disney for breach of contract as she was promised that the movie would only be released in theaters and agreed to have her final salary be based on box office sales. Disney needed this to come out to set up Hawkeye, and Covid risks pretty much promised that crowds at theaters would be smaller than they would have been back in 2019. They really screwed Scar Jo, which is dub, because come on, if they’d renegotiated, I seriously doubt Scar Jo would have fought them too hard on allowing a Disney+ premier in exchange for more upfront. Yes, I’m on Scar Jo’s side. She deserves to be paid what she’s worth for her roles, and Disney really screwed their arraignment up by trying to go around her. All I’m saying. So yeah, the movie is fun, and I enjoyed seeing Natasha have the solo run that she deserved back in phase 1 or 2. And to think, this entire story really just explained where Natasha got her vest that she wore in Endgame. Have a good night, everybody!

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