Black Widow

Year 13, Day 230 - 8/18/21 - Movie #3,915 - VIEWED on 7/13/21.   

BEFORE: If you look back at my movies from last fall, it's easy to see that I was saving a space for "Black Widow", with several films starring Scarlett Johansson - right after October ended, I had "Jojo Rabbit", "Under the Skin" and "The Perfect Score", all in a row.  I was hoping against hope that this film still would have found a way to get released in 2020, only it didn't.  The plan was to watch the 2019 reboot of "Hellboy" and then link right into the Scarlett chain, via David Harbour.  I think I probably had to re-work my chain three times last year because "Black Widow" kept getting delayed, it's amazing that I still was able to come up with a year-long unbroken chain of 300 films.  

So this has been a LONG time coming, as you all probably know.  I think the original release date for this was, what, May 2020?  or was it July?  After all this time, and all the delays, could any film possibly live up to the hype?  I guess I'm finally going to find out...

William Hurt carries over from "Too Big to Fail". 

THE PLOT: A film about Natasha Romanoff in her quests between the films "Civil War" and "Infinity War". 

AFTER:  Bits of "The Americans" and half of "Red Sparrow" get mixed in to Black Widow's traditional origin story from the comic books, and then the ending totally rips off elements from "The Avengers", which unfortunately is a sign that the superhero genre is starting to feed on itself.  But on the other hand, Marvel movies are BACK, and we finally get something besides the TV shows "WandaVision", "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" and "Loki".  Sure, those shows were pretty great, but they weren't MOVIES, now, were they?  

When I think back to the early days of Marvel Comics, before she was an Avenger, Black Widow was a villain, a Russian spy, of course, and she'd fought Iron Man and roped Hawkeye in to her life of crime.  When they first printed an origin for her, they said she was an actual widow, because of a government-arranged marriage to a Russian pilot who was only apparently dead, but really he was still alive and had been turned into a Soviet superhero, the Red Guardian.  I'm not sure why the Soviets needed their superheroes to pretend to be dead, I guess living a double life as a reporter or a tech billionaire is only reserved for capitalists.  (In Soviet Russia, super-power serum takes YOU!)

So the new MCU entry takes the old Black Widow origin from the comics and puts something of a spin on it, the man known as Red Guardian was Natasha's pretend father, a Russian spy living in America with a fake family, a female scientist was her fake mother and she had a younger fake sister, too.  This just may be important down the road.  Once the family escaped from American and made it back to Russian soil, the fake family was dissolved and the two young girls were put into the "Red Room" program, trained as espionage agents.  

If you saw "Avengers: Endgame", then you know why they couldn't move forward with Black Widow's story, they had to go back in time, so this is set between "Captain America: Civil War", when the Avengers were split down the middle on the issue of superhero registration and government control, and "Avengers: Infinity War", where half of the Avengers reunited and busted the other half out of prison.  So this became something of a side-quest for Black Widow to take while on the run from the U.S. government, in violation of the Sokovia Accords.  She flees to a safehouse in Norway, but gets a mysterious package from her former fake sister, and then gets attacked by a villain known as Taskmaster.

(Taskmaster's also from the comic books, he's usually a villain depicted with some kind of photographic reflexes, so by watching footage of heroes in action he can somehow automatically learn how to fight like Black Panther, or shoot arrows like Hawkeye or even throw a shield like Captain America.  It's a bit of a writing time-saver, so a comic doesn't have to show a villain learning how to fight, and he can sort of automatically know whatever he needs to know to be more dangerous and harder to fight.)

Similar to what they did to the Power Broker and Flag-Smasher in "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier", Disney's new diversity program insists that the Taskmaster must now be female, but really, is this progress?  Making more female villains, I think maybe that's not what people calling for more female representation had in mind.  What if your film went out of its way to hire more Asians and African-Americans, but made all of those characters terrible people?  That isn't necessarily helping.  The film also ends up presenting us with a line-up of Widows that is culturally diverse, even though that makes no sense in a society like the former Soviet Union.  You have to ask yourself here, would the Red Room program, before the fall of the Iron Curtain, go out of its way to train an inclusive, ethnically diverse squad of female spies, or does it seem more likely that it would spend more on training their white agents, and give them the most responsibility?  This only sort of works if you consider the training program to have a torture-like aspect to it, which I'll admit is possible.

Natasha finds out from her former sister, Yelena, that the Red Room training program is still active, and the man in charge of it, General Dreykov, is still alive, even though Natasha has a distinct memory of killing him.  To fight him, the two Widows have to travel by helicopter to a Siberian prison and break out Alexei Shostakov, aka the Red Guardian, aka their former fake father. Shostakov spends his days arm-wrestling the other prisoners, and talking about his glory days as the Soviet equivalent of Captain America, even though there's no way he could have fought Steve Rogers, who would have been frozen in ice while he was an active superhero.  So perhaps he never really had any glory days at all, and he's full of it.

In this role, David Harbour is great - it's perfect casting for him.  I've got no complaints about his Russian accent, though it tends at times to venture into the comical.  I can't say the same about Ray Winstone, though, whose bright idea was it to cast a British actor with a thick Cockney accent as a Russian General?  Terrible.  

My other NITPICK POINTS are that this film seems, in some ways, very small when compared with the bigger Avengers films, like "Age of Ultron" and "Infinity War", there's just not that much meaningful stuff happening here.  And then a major plot point is a repeat (or a call-back, whichever) to the first "Avengers" film, only that film did it first, and much better.  Very important, STAY until the end of the film, for the post-credits scene, but you already knew that, right?  It kind of links up with something seen at the end of "Falcon and Winter Soldier", which could be VERY important for the next Avengers movie.  

By the way, I saw this film in the movie theater, for free.  I know it's available on Disney Plus for an extra fee, but I've been working at a movie theater for over a month now, and for several days I didn't allow myself to peek into the theater at the end, because I was too afraid of seeing important at the end - so I couldn't go in to sweep up the theater until the post-credits scene ended, but there were always some people staying in their seats until the very end, so that didn't matter much.  Since I could see any movie playing at other theaters in the same chain, of course I went to a different theater, not the one I work at, to watch "Black Widow", because who wants to spend an additional two hours in the place where they work?  Besides, that would have made me feel like I also would have to sweep up after the show I just watched in my free time.  No, I went to a different NYC theater in the same chain, a bigger one, a cleaner one.  

I've been planning my escape from this job for some time, and it looks like maybe by September 1 I'll have succeeded, I have to hand in my notice in a few days so I'll be clear to start a new job.  This means that if I watch "The Suicide Squad" on HBO Max, I'll only have watched ONE movie for free at the chain where I work, which hardly seems worth it.  But then again, I joined Apple TV just to watch one Bill Murray movie, "On the Rocks", and then I quit the next day, so maybe it's a bit like that.  I'm not sure it was worth it, to spend three months sweeping up and taking out the trash, just to see "Black Widow" for free. Well, I did get paid for my time, plus I got out of the house and I did get some exercise, so there are a few other positives as well.  Still, I'm ready to move on. 

Also starring Scarlett Johansson (last seen in "The Perfect Score"), Florence Pugh (last seen in "Fighting with My Family"), David Harbour (last seen in "End of Watch"), Rachel Weisz (last seen in "The Brothers Bloom"), Ray Winstone (last seen in "Fool's Gold"), O-T Fagbenle (last heard in "Non-Stop"), Olga Kurylenko (last seen in "Johnny English Strikes Again"), Liani Samuel, Michelle Lee (last seen in "You, Me and Dupree"), Nanna Blondell, Olivier Richters, Ever Anderson, Violet McGraw (last seen in "Doctor Sleep"), Ryan Kiera Armstrong (last seen in "It: Chapter Two"), Kurt Yue (last seen in "Irresistible"), Robert Pralgo (last seen in "Father Figures"), with a cameo appearance by (redacted) (last seen in "Downhill"), and archive footage of Roger Moore (last seen in "A View to a Kill"), Richard Kiel (last seen in "Force 10 from Navarone"), Michael Lonsdale (last seen in "The Remains of the Day").

RATING: 7 out of 10 trained pigs