Movie Review: Black Widow

Right off the bat, it’s a bit of a downer watching Black Widow knowing that Romanov sacrifices herself in Endgame. Set in the time after the incidents of Captain America: Civil War, this movie gives a proper backstory to Natasha Romanov and lets the audience know how she became the Black Widow. But that’s not all it does because this movie is a portal to the Black Widow’s sister (herself a Black Widow) getting a movie, if not a franchise, for herself.

Onto the movie- like all superhero movies it’s over the top. And while that’s a given, what makes the other ones stand apart as the special effects, pithy dialogues or the droll humour that you get from Loki, Ironman and even Banner. This one falls fairly flat because a) you know Romanov is going to come out unscathed and b) the back story and the players are seem tired and rather jaded to do any real justice to the plot.

Florence Pugh as Romanov’s “sister” provides a bit of freshness to the otherwise droll tepid plot which has a ‘bent-on-ruling-the-world’ bad guy and a bunch of people who need to be rescued while the widow moves onto reuniting with the Avengers.

The chemistry between the characters in the movie was off to say the least with the title sequence possibly being the slickest bit of footage in the entire movie. The way Romanov and her family manage to escape the destruction of the bad guy’s lair; careening and free falling without getting the slightly nick from all the debris falling all around them is extremely ho-hum. But it’s a superhero movie and Barton and Romanov were the only two Avengers who didn’t have any extraordinary powers barring their innate prowess in fighting.

Rachel Weisz, William Hurt are held back by the script from taking their characters further and Ray Winstone as the baddie leaves a lot to be desired since his menace, overall creep-quotient is rather lame.

This movie is streaming on Disney Hotstar in India and for that am glad because I’d have kicked myself for paying money to watch this in the theatre in a non-Covid world. For those of us who are MCU fans, it makes sense to watch it to preserve the continuum of the entire series (although BW was released much later than it was supposed to be); the rest of us can give it a miss. Neither the acting nor the sequences or the OST do anything for the audience.