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Scarlett Johansson crashes through a film that seems to exist by contractual obligation, Black Widow |
As the credits rolled on this formulaic slice of Marvel
adventurism, I couldn’t for the life of me work out why it even existed in the
first place. For a film centred around Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow
character, I expected to come out of this epic with some new understanding of
her character. Not only do we not learn anything about her at all, we get no
additional insight into what makes her tick, no deeper look into her character.
We learn nothing about her that we don’t know already: and the film isn’t even
smart or profound enough to reflect on the fact that we all know that the
character died in the last film we saw her in. Does it exist solely so
Marvel can say “Look we made a film about the only female Avenger, so shut up
already!”
The film is stuck between being a greatest hits celebration
of Johansson’s work elsewhere and providing as much focus as possible for
Florence Pugh to take up the mantle in future films. In fact, the focus is so
much on Pugh – who is terrific and gets all the best lines – that Johansson
becomes a bit of a straight-man in her own damn movie. It’s Black Widow who has
to say all the unhip, dull things (“We can’t steal that car!”) while her sister
snipes, swears and plays devil-may-care with the consequences. For what should
be her moment in the sun, Johansson gets rather short-changed here. But then
perhaps she didn’t really care – it certainly never feels that she had anything
she was determined to say or do here, other than cash a huge cheque.
The film is framed around a back story of villainy involving
the nasty Dollshouse-style assassin school that both sisters were forced to
attend, here revealed to still be in operation with a team of brainwashed
female assassins. At the centre, like a creepy Charlie with brain-washed Angels,
is General Dreykov, played by a barely-even-trying Ray Winstone (his accent is
laughably atrocious). Dreykov is such a peripheral figure in the film that he
never feels like either a threat or a dark manipulative force and his “plan” is
such an after-thought, Winstone has to hurriedly state it for the first time in
a final act monologue.
The film is supposed to be about misogyny, and how Dreykov
has left a poisonous legacy of abuse of young women for his own ends. This
includes forcing his daughter (a thankless mute role under a helmet for Olga
Kurylenko) into a killer robber-suit as the sort of uber-assassin. Natasha is
plagued with guilt about harming this character in the past – a guilt that
would have way more impact on the viewer if we had seen even one
bloody scene of them together to establish a relationship. How much more
interesting, too, would the film have been if we had seen Kurylenko’s character
as the new head of this abusive ring of spies, having taken up her father’s
mantle and absorbing his poisonous world view. But no, such nuances are beyond
this film.
There are a few moments of emotion and comedy gained from
Natasha’s fake family – the parents who are not her parents, the sister who is
not her sister. This odd group reunion makes for some laughs, but its
noticeable that the main emotional impact is on Pugh’s younger, less settled
character rather than the confident, assured Natasha. It’s another major flaw
in the film: at the end of the day, I can’t imagine this had any real impact on
the character at all. Does Natasha really change her view of herself at the
end? No: she talks the talk about having “a new family” but her level of
connection with them (certainly with her parents) doesn’t seem to go much
beyond patient affection. Again, the real emotional impact is on Pugh’s
character who has finally found something to base her life on: this would have
worked so much better as an origins story.
Instead, this seems to exist solely to answer a trivia
question I’m not sure anyone was asking: “What did Black Widow do in between Captain
America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War?” If your life really
was lacking without the answer to that, this is the film for you. Otherwise,
there is little at all to make any of this stand out from any of the other 20+ Marvel
films. Its action scenes are cookie-cutter (naturally everywhere Natasha goes,
the place is destroyed), the emotional beats are completely unrevealing, the
baddie so forgettable you might even miss it when he dies, and we get a few
actors (Harbour and Weisz) coasting on a couple of decent lines and bit of
comic business. Apart from anything involving Florence Pugh, this film is
totally and utterly forgettable.
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