Black Widow (2021)

 Score: 4.5 / 5

Too late? Maybe, but certainly not too little. After a decade starring in various MCU feature films, Scarlett Johansson's Natasha Romanoff finally gets her own top billing. Heaven knows we wanted -- and she deserved -- Black Widow ages ago. There is more than enough character development and backstory for her alone to have carried a movie series back in the first phase, to say nothing of the richly detailed, mysterious characters in her world of espionage. And then, after 20th Century Fox released Red Sparrow in 2018, I figured all hope was lost for a solo Romanoff movie; it's not the same, but it's damn close. Now that her character has been sacrificed in Endgame, I fully expected this movie to wallow in sentiment, forcing tears out for the star finally getting to shine under her own marquee. But instead, we're given a miraculous movie out of time, one that feels like that first Iron Man but infinitely better: a complex standalone feature woven with a surprisingly fresh origin story that reminds us of what we loved about the MCU in its opening stages.

Nat, having recently fled the authorities -- William Hurt as General Ross -- during her change of allegiance in Civil War, moves from one family in turmoil to another. This time, it's her own. Living off the grid, she receives a package from her sister Yelena; Yelena was also forced on the run from the other Widows after discovering a cure for their chemical mind-control by secret Soviet power players. She journeys to find her sister, and the two embark on a quest to save the Widows and the world from the head of the Widow program, the presumed-dead Dreykov and his legendary Red Room. It's an interesting reversal of the other MCU stories led by men actively seeking to become super soldiers; here, the women seek freedom from these chemically-altered human weapons.

It's a dazzling movie, and frankly each new development took me by happy surprise. I had no real idea the direction in which this plot would go, or even when in the timeline it would take place. Director Cate Shortland and writer Eric Pearson (Agent Carter, Thor: Ragnarok, Godzilla vs. Kong) craft a very '70s spy movie with a very contemporary sensibility, loaded with references to the genre (The Manchurian Candidate and Mission: Impossible come to mind right away for specific, obvious reasons) but, amazingly, never feeling derivative or uninspired. In fact, this movie makes me want to go back and rewatch one of my favorite MCU movies, The Winter Soldier, because its content and kinetic energy are equally matched. Also like that picture, Black Widow centers its energy on two main thrusts of subversive theming for superhero movies: secret government conspiracies undermining traditional American interests, and heroes needing community rather than independence.

This is the kind of movie that makes me want to go back and watch Johansson in the other MCU films she's graced, not because it fits in so well (although it does indeed), but because it just reminds me of what a quiet powerhouse she is in everything she touches. Even in this movie, which she deftly and magnificently leads, she generously gives major time to her co-stars, notably her family. Florence Pugh steals the entire movie as Yelena, a role that's great on its own but clearly designed to be the next iteration of the character, as she will certainly continue in Hawkeye and future projects. At once impossibly strong and critically vulnerable, her richly developed character and pitch-perfect performance rank among the franchise's very best. David Harbour has his share of quality scenes as the sisters' father-figure, the Russian version of Captain America, Red Guardian. Sadly, Rachel Weisz is not given comparable scenes as Melina, the mother-figure, but she is reliably wonderful nevertheless. I was worried initially about the family being part of the tragedy of this movie -- after all, since we haven't seen or heard of them before, I reasonably assumed they would die by movie's end -- but the film's opening sequence (very The Americans, by the by) establishes the family as fraudulent, spies thrust together in Ohio before the "parents" completed their intelligence mission and the girls would be taken and trained as the world's best assassins.

Even when things get a little more familiar in the film's third act, Black Widow has a few surprises up its sleeve. While its villain isn't as iconic or compelling as we've had from the MCU lately, the sheer menace of the Red Room makes up for a lot of heavy exposition or world-building. Ray Winstone's Dreykov is hate-able, and that's more than enough for this story, despite the screenwriter's attempts to make him extra deplorable: in his climactic villain speech with Nat, he reveals that he has preyed on orphaned girls to become his Widows because "With you, an Avenger under my control, I can finally come out of the shadows using the only natural resource that the world has too much of: girls." A didactic howler of a line, it nevertheless earns some credit in the film's final sequence, as the group of Widows wonder aloud what they can do with their newfound free will.

And then there's Taskmaster, a much scarier threat than Crossbones or other similar villains, a killing machine in blue and silver whose silence and possibly mechanized body are the stuff of action figures and terror. Taskmaster features as part of the movie's shocking twist, and while not central to the film, manages to carve out a niche unvisited by Phase One or any phase since. During the final action sequence -- less a climax than a literal denouement -- as the characters fly through the sky in an acrobatic free fall, I briefly found myself annoyed by the overly familiar concept. Then, however, much as with Taskmaster, I realized the film was doing something remarkable yet again: turning the staple scene into an original, fresh, and relentlessly urgent new version of itself. Black Widow recycles and reimagines standard tropes from other spy thrillers, as we've noted, and here it does the same for superhero flicks this same franchise made trite over a decade ago. Even during her confrontation with Dreykov, I found myself thinking of the endless monologues of Bond villains and how and why the MCU was parodying and repurposing that very device.

It's still sad to remember that this will likely be the last we see of Johansson's Romanoff, at least in any measurable content. But it's a damn good way for her to go, and a safe, brilliant way for the franchise to launch us into Phase Four.