What's good, CV? Site bugs? Crappy political agendas forced into our comic books at the cost of desecrating our beloved childhood characters as mouthpieces? Oh...not a lot then. Well the theaters are opening up and here is our first Marvel movie after 2 years, and the long awaited solo movie that Scarlett Johansson has deserved for almost a decade now, Black Widow. As usual, there will be potential spoilers down below, I will try and black those pieces out so if you do not want to read them then don't, or if you want to skip to the end of the review for my final thoughts, just scroll really fast or control F that ish In Conclusion and do it. But anyways, here we go.

Synopsis

Black Widow is a 2021 film that is directed by Cate Shortland, and stars the beautiful Scarlett Johansson (simp), David Harbour as the Red Guardian, Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova, (new simp), Rachel Weisz as Melina Vostokoff, OT Fagbenle as Guy Friend, and Ray Winstone as the villainous Dreykov. The movie starts with a bit of an origin story as to how Natasha got into the Red Room from her days as a child. After that, we head to our modern day where the film is set directly after the events of Civil War and before Infinity War. Nat is the on the run from the government and goes into hiding where she ultimately gets pulled in to face the ghosts of her past.

Pros

Acting: Just right out of the gate, the acting was top notch in this film. Everyone from Scarlett, Florence, Winstone, Weisz, Fagbenle to the random widows etc all did their parts incredibly well. When they had to be angry, you could see it. When they had to be sad, you could see it. When it was funny, it was funny. I think Florence was really the standout for me. I think she really stole a lot of the scenes, she was a badass, looked the part, was still funny at times with her deadpan humor. Scarlett I think she proved here she could actually lead a big blockbuster movie like this. I know she's had her own solo movies before like Lucy etc, but it was never Marvel big. She's always seemed to have been relegated as big star support cast. She's great, and I think Scarlett nailed what she was trying to do in this movie.

Action: Just straight up, the fights were awesome. The first 15 minutes was pretty cool. The fight choreography was great, the action was well done. We had enough explosions and that makes brain do a happy. Watching Natasha fight a room full of Widows and hold her own really solidified as her as one of the best fighters in the MCU. We had some epic CGI scenes that were kind of outlandish, but hey, still cool to me.

Cinematography: The movie itself looked great. We had great shots, awesome environments, the settings were done very well.

Music: I've seen some people disagree on this part a lot and fair, it is what it is, but I actually liked the music. The opening credits especially was awesome. The song selection for some of the scenes was done pretty well. Unfortunately, outside of those, nothing really stuck out. But Marvel since the success of Guardians has seemingly had to add in some type of song in almost all the movies to use as a plot point. We get a good ole' U.S. of A classic here, and I loved it.

Dreykov: I haven't seen much said about Ray Winstone, but he was a highlight for me. The one thing Marvel has been pretty bad about is the villains. Outside of Thanos, Bucky, Red Skull,originally Loki, and I liked Ronan (went out like a punk) the villains have been pretty forgettable or turned into jokes. We never got that with Dreykov. He was a very Kingpin/Zemo-esque villain and played the mental game and politics. We see the scope and control that he potentially had. He wasn't over the top corny and had contingencies for almost everything. While he wasn't in the film for very long, Winstone made me want him to actually get got. I think he's going to go down as a rather underrated villain and unfortunately is overshadowed by Taskmaster, which I will be getting into now.

Humor: I'll say for the most part I did enjoy the humor in this movie. What I think it did well despite the Marvel formula of ruining the tension so much with jokes is it kept the levity of most of the scenes when it needed to. I think as far as Marvel movies go, this was done better. Not perfect, but I will say done better.

Cons

Taskmaster: I'm about to spoil this, soooo...yeah. They Barakapool'd Taskmaster, y'all. That was a very Untaskmaster Taskmaster. Turns out to be a girl named Antonia, (at least a Tony reference), isn't cocky, says nothing, has a magic backpack of weapons, had this dramatic thunk every footstep, like you're armor isn't that heavy. Just a waste of such a sought after character. At least the fights were cool.

Plot/Script: The overall plot was pretty weak. A lot of things seemed to happen just to happen, and because of that Natasha seems more of like an observer in her own movie vs really being the one to drive things forward. What this movie really suffers from was a case of the don't knows. Where did this antigen stuff come from? Don't know. Who made it? We don't know. How does her friend keep finding super expensive things so much? Don't know. Did he have a name? Don't remember. Why are her and Yelena fighting in the safe house? Don't know. How did Yelena know of her safe house and to store this case of vials there and that they would go to Nat's supposedly hidden bunker because of friend? Don't know. How did Taskmaster track these mysterious vials across the planet, but lose track of them in a subway just because of a trail of blood? Don't know. Why is Red Guardian in prison? Don't know How did a little girl survive a bomb exploding in her face and a multistory building collapsing on her? Don't know. I'm okay with movies having some plotholes, and not everything needs to be explained, but that stuff can sometime catch up and I think hurts it more than helps it.

50/50

I'm gonna do something new here. I feel in terms of Marvel movies, and you can say this in a lot of movies I guess, Marvel has taken gambles on certain things that I don't think is inherently wrong and depending on how you..take it in can add or take away things from a movie. Because of this, I don't think it's really fair to stick them in a bad category. For example, Trevor from Iron man 3. Was it funny? Honestly, yes. At my first time seeing the movie, I hated it. I think it ruined the chance of the real Mandarin. Instead we got some weird Extremis/Fin Fang Foom human thing with Guy Pierce. But at the time, some people really liked that twist and they enjoyed the movie for it. Did that twist itself really ruin the movie? No. Certain creative liberties don't need to be taken or made, like the entirety of Captain Marvel, but just because one is and it doesn't go over well, doesn't mean it's a bad movie entirely.

David Harbour: Does he play his part really well in this movie? Yes, he actually does. I liked him in this movie. I thought he played the boisterous, self-centered old man living in his glory days really well. He was strong, he absolutely looked the part of a literal bear of a man, he had some pretty cool "oh, shit" moments. But I can see on the flip side, he can be annoying. I don't think it was a really accurate representation of Red Guardian. Not all of his jokes landed. I think I've seen some people complain they were fat-shaming him by using him being overweight as jokes and compared it to Ragnarok Thor, when some characters and people are assholes like Rocket, though we love him and he has a heart of gold in that furry little body of his. All I'm gonna say is he was a lot better here than in Hellboy, so he gets a plus from me.

Winter Soldier Inspiration: This movie I can say was heavily inspired by the Winter Soldier. I get it's a movie focusing on a spy, so there's only so much to be done, but it does take a lot of elements from WS, which I find to be probably Marvel's best movie overall, outside of something big like Infinity War. So it does kind of I feel come across as a WS-lite almost. There is a lot of twists, some obvious, some not as obvious. But being 50/50, I did have some knee jerk reactions before my brain started piecing stuff together. Nat did some good prep shit in this movie, some were done well, others...eh. So how you can take these I think will determine some of the impact of the movie. Unless you predicted everything going on, then you sir, madame, or whatever pronoun you are comfortable with is playing 5-D chess with Thought Robot and Living Tribunal while some of us are playing Tic Tac Toe against the drunk uncle on napkin at Red Lobster with one of those three crayons they gave us.

Family: Good thing this came out around F9 because it does have a lot of family. I think I might move this to a con, but I get what they were trying to do with it. There is a forcible family dynamic trying to be shoved here, but at times they make mention of why there is no familial connection. So I feel like this movie acknowledges what it is trying to do but also has enough wherewithal to acknowledge why it can also not work.

In Conclusion

Overall, all I will say is to get an accurate assumption of this movie, go see this movie when you can. It's the first Marvel movie in 2 years during a pandemic. I've seen so many different opinions of such as "this being a failure" or "this is awesome, they did everything right". Both of which, I don't think are true, but aren't inherently wrong either. My personal opinion...I liked it. I think this movie should've happened before Captain Marvel, which I believe I gave a 5. Captain Marvel to me is essentially the family cookout that you don't want to go to, but have to go to and while you may get a laugh or two out of it, you realize it's a completely unnecessary event with some bad decisions sprinkled in. This movie itself didn't necessarily need to happen either, but it DESERVEDLY needed to happen. This movie does suffer from it's plot at its core. It does suffer from another bad villain and butchering of a character. It did force the family dynamic a bit much at times. But while it has its faults, I did enjoy myself almost the entire way through. I enjoyed the characters, I enjoyed the interactions, I enjoyed the passing of the torch to Yelena. I loved the fights. I laughed. The end credits kind of kicked me in the balls too because it acknowledged the reality of the MCU going forward without Natasha. So while the plot suffers to make it an average movie, it's really the cast chemistry and fights that really managed to pull this movie up just above being average to an average Marvel movie with more heart. I do think it could've been better, but it was a decent send off for Scarlett, and if she's happy, we should be happy.

Final Rating: 7/10