BLACK WIDOW (2021)
Directed by Cate Shortland
Marvel/Disney, 134 minutes, PG-13
★★
In some circles, there’s been an angry backlash against the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences because Black Widow was blanked in Oscar nominations. If you hadn’t noticed, it’s probably because you’re neither a teenaged fanboy nor an adult suffering from delayed development. Heaven knows there are plenty of reasons to be critical of the Oscars but for once its snub was a good call.
Black Widow is the 24th edition of the Marvel Universe and that train ran out of creative steam long ago. It should tell you everything you need to know that this film is distributed by Disney. Read into this that all subversive edges have been filed to rounded corners to accommodate values that don’t push the envelope much further than presenting an unorthodox nuclear family.
Black Widow is at heart a Cold War movie that’s set in the years 1995-2016. Umm…. the Cold War ended in 1991. Okay, it’s a comic book but this is a glaring misstep even for Marvel, which loves alternative timelines and parallel universes. The opening sequences are set in Ohio (Georgia, actually), where a family living undercover makes a mad dash to an airport with police and intelligence officers in hot pursuit. See police cars go flying through the air. Hear loud explosions. Watch paterfamilias Alexi Shostakov (David Barbour) hurl himself onto the wing of a small plane and trade assault rifle fire with members of S.H.I.E.L.D. (an intelligence agency) who couldn’t hit a target with a bazooka from 3 feet away, though Alexi is capable of shooting his gun and hang on after takeoff. They land in Cuba where the wounded fake mom, Melina Vostokov (Rachel Weisz) is rushed into surgery, and her two young “daughters,” Natasha and Yelena are separated. We learn later that, against their will, they are transported to the Red Room to be trained as Black Widows, assassins under the control–vials of red chemical gasses factor into this–of Dreykov (Ray Winstone), a Russian general with his own agenda.
When we pick up the tale years later, Alexi is in a Russian prison, Natasha (Scarlett Johansson) has defected to S.H.I.E.L.D., has allied with the Avengers, and hasn’t seen Yelena (Florence Pugh) since Cuba. Natasha thinks she has killed Dreykov and his daughter, but that’s not the case. Too bad; we could have ended the movie right there. Instead, we have to reunite our Disney family, blow up a lot of things, watch ScarJo run from many, many bullets, always in a straight line–the better to see her tight-fitting outfit–but not get shot when she busts Alexi out of a maximum-security facility. (Isn’t the point of automatic weapons that you can’t miss?)
After that it’s track Dreykov who is, in turn, tracking Alexi, Natasha, and Yelena with Melina’s help (or not). Can they save the world? Can Alexi fit into the uniform that makes him look like he washed out of Human Cannonball school? Did I mention that lots of things blow up? Can Natasha’s lovelorn admirer Rick Mason (O-T Fagbenle) get a rise out of her? What is the Lycra tension of ScarJo’s white uniform? Do you care?
Black Widow was a classic summer movie–loud, high on thrills, and low in logic, character depth, or background development. It presumes that viewers have faithfully followed the Avengers series and its various offshoots; if you’ve not, you might well wonder what in the name of red chemicals is going on. You’ll probably assume, though, that the world will be saved and that the titular character will live to save it again in the future.
Am I being too hard on this movie? Maybe, but you need not take my word for it. It’s made a lot of money–there are a lot of fanboys out there–and it’s good that it did rake it in because it costs a lot of lucre to destroy things. If you check out other critics, though, you’ll see that many of them were underwhelmed. Black Widow’s weighted score is 67%. In the Grade Inflation Alt-Universe, that’s like passing someone with a D-. Fanboys gave it an A-. Make of that what you will.
Rob Weir
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