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Tripwire Reviews Black Widow

Published

5 years ago

July 8, 2021

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Family Misfortunes

Tripwire’s editor-in-chief reviews Marvel’s Black Widow out in cinemas and on Disney Plus now. Warning: spoilers ahead…

Black Widow
Director: Cat Shortland
Stars: Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Rachel Weisz, Ray Winstone

A victim of the Coronavirus, Black Widow has at last made it to cinemas and on Disney Plus to watch as of this week. The last Marvel movie on the big screen was Avengers: Endgame back in April 2019 and since then, Marvel and Disney have been forced to switch the cinema for the TV with shows like WandaVision, The Falcon and The Winter Soldier and Loki taking the place of big-screen fare.

Black Widow is set just after 2016’s Captain America: Civil War since she was killed in Endgame with Natasha Romanoff on the run after the Avengers temporarily broke up and tells the origin of the character.

We are introduced to Yelena Belova, played by Florence Pugh, as well as Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour) and Melina Vostokoff, played by Rachel Weisz. The three appear to be Romanoff’s family with Shostakov and Vostakoff her parents and Belova her baby sister. But of course nothing is as it seems here. We discover that Romanoff and Belova are part of a Russian programme to create an army of lethal super assassins, or Black Widows, headed up by Dreykov, played by Ray Winstone. So the film deals with Black Widow and her attempt to atone for the past and bring the people who have manipulated her and her sister to justice while reuniting her family.

It is nice to see Marvel action on the big screen again after a two-year break and director Shortland with screenwriters Jac Shaeffer, Ned Benson and Eric Pearson has created a pacey fast-moving fun superhero action movie here. New characters Shostakov, aka Russian superhero Red Guardian, and Belova work well with Johansson. Pugh has real onscreen chemistry with Johansson and Harbour manages to be funny and menacing at the same time. Johannson Weisz is decent although she doesn’t have a great deal to do here. The only poor choice here is Winstone as Russian general Dreykov who has one of the worst accents in many a year.

In terms of its tone, it shares the approach of Captain America: Winter Soldier although obviously thanks to its core story, it also has quite a bit in common with Matt Damon’s Bourne films.

Despite its checkered production and release history, Black Widow is a perfectly decent Marvel movie which works as a standalone film with some impressive set pieces and a fun little post-credits sequence that leads into future Marvel projects.

JOEL MEADOWS

Here’s Black Widow’s trailer too