Streamium Saturday #25: Black Widow

COVID ruined a lot for us, didn't it, Ticketholders?

I mean, along with the unnecessary deaths of millions of people, unprecedented unemployment rates, the largest multi-phase stimulus program in history, a prolonged economic shutdown, government incompetence at the highest level, human insanity at every level, and introducing the world to the most mysterious and adaptable virus since HIV, we were forced to stay indoors and watch old things on our televisions! How inconvenient! How unnecessary! How dare a globally pervasive biological agent prevent comic book Cinematic Universe fans with progressive minds from vicariously participating in the Marvel vs. DC Battle Of the Female-Led Superhero Movies on the largest screen their local theater could afford to maintain by charging their patrons a 400-800% mark-up on candy and soda? Of all the nerve, right? Right?

"In case you couldn't tell, I was being sarcastic"

So, for those who didn't know, Black Widow is one of those movie projects from Development Hell that should have been made in Phase One, but wasn't because the MCU didn't fully trust itself yet and the man in charge of everything was a heroine-hater named Ike Perlmutter (the kind of name that makes you think of an asshole principal from an 80s movie, or the asshole antagonist from an early Adam Sandler movie). Just look at the guy!

If that isn't the punchable face of somebody who would enjoy giving Emilio Estevez and Molly Ringwald detention while also trying to get Adam Sandler's grandma's retirement home condemned, I don't know what is.
Anyway, thanks to Marvel's principal Perlmutter up there rejecting proposed female-led superhero movie ideas left and right, work on Black Widow didn't get put into motion until late 2017, and didn't get a female director until 2018. So by the time filming wrapped in October 2019 (with COVID rearing its ugly, squeaky-toy-shaped head two months later), the character had already made her Vormir sacrifice in Avengers: Endgame, so the best consolation prize that female empowerment could get for itself was a continuity-expanding prequel, the main purpose of which was to use her as a point of endearment toward her much younger, much better at holding a Russian accent, much more not dead replacement. Yay?
And to top it all off, the original plan was to have Black Widow finished in time to compete on the big screen with Wonder Woman 1984 (guess which one is better!), but COVID happened, WW84 was a straight-to-streaming, bonkers mess of a film, and because China is made of money (and the source of COVID, complete non sequitor...), Black Widow was delayed again in favor of hybrid-releasing Mulan on Disney+ and in theaters, and then delayed again because still COVID and because theatre-going humans (and humans in general) are selfish and incapable of following safety protocols. So now, it's 2021, the hype train behind the female-empowerment Marvel vs. DC debate is dead, and it's time to see how Black Widow, with or without everything left in its wake, holds up among its peers.

Remember to click those social media buttons at the bottom of this post, leave a comment in the comments section, share it around the interwebs, and get ready for a SPOILER Warning!

Black Widow takes place during and after the events of Captain America: Civil War, when Natasha Romanoff, a.k.a. Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson, currently best known for making SNL's Colin Jost look good) is on the run from the government for violating the Sokovia Accords and taking Captain America's side in the eponymous war. As a child, Natasha was part of a Soviet sleeper family living in Ohio, along with "father" Alexei Shostakov, a.k.a. Red Guardian (Captain America, but for Russia, played by Stranger Things and Hellboy star David Harbour), "mother" Melina Vostokoff (an earlier Black Widow turned mind-control researcher played by The Mummy star Rachel Weisz), and "sister" Yelena Belova (the aforementioned replacement Black Widow, played by Fighting With My Family, Midsommar, and Little Women star Florence Pugh). When the day comes for their activation, the four steal a floppy disk (that's like a flash drive, but bigger, floppier, more obsolete, and with laughably smaller storage capacity) containing data that will serve as the foundation for all Soviet mental conditioning techniques going forward. Maybe. It's more assumed and inferred than outright stated, but best to prepare yourselves for that now. Oh, and Don Henley's "American Pie" is Black Widow's version of how Loki uses the color purple for some reason, because soon after, the "family" are chased by the US government and Melina is near-fatally wounded. When they get to Cuba to deliver the floppy disk, she is taken away by Soviet forces, and Marvel does the horror movie trailer thing where somebody like Christina Perry or Billie Elisha sings a grunge song like it's a breakup ballad. I wonder who the secret villain of the movie will be?
Speaking of death, with no Black Widow in sight, we are introduced to the new Black Widow and her squad of other Black Widows who are trying to kill another Black Widow who stole a brainwashing antidote from the Red Room,

a literal Black Widow factory run by General Dreykov (Ray Winstone, playing yet another creepy, Ray Winstonean villain, but now doing only a slightly better job at holding a Russian accent than Sean Connery in The Hunt For Red October), whose daughter died in an explosion at the order of Natasha's Black Widow. I wonder who else is a candidate for secret villain reveal, huh?
Said secret villain is the Taskmaster. In the comics, Taskmaster was a peak-human villain with the ability of photographic muscle memory, meaning that any action that he saw and was physically capable of, he could replicate. This led to his design being cobbled together from a skeletal facemask, a white version of the Hobgoblin's cape and cowl, and your typical unitard, gloves, and boots costume in blue and white. His cumbersome arsenal included a Batman-esque grappling hook so he could swing like Spider-Man, a bow and arrow because he saw Hawkeye shoot once, a vibranium shield because ditto Captain America, and a sword because maybe Black Knight or Deadpool or something. Here, Taskmaster looks like a character from the Metal Heroes franchise who has a thing for Arrowverse hoodies, and surprise! It's a woman! Now, if you had to choose, would you say Taskmaster is the veteran Black Widow who practically raised Natasha, knows everything about mental conditioning, and almost died at the beginning of the movie like somebody was trying to set something up? Or is it the girl we barely see for two seconds who has only a fleeting and secondary connection to our main character, and whom we saw get blown up in a flashback near the thirty minute mark? If you think that a message about female empowerment, concentrated into a highly personal, mother-versus-daughter, teacher-versus-student fight to the death aboard an exploding sky fortress sounds like the coolest fucking thing you've ever heard in your life...you are giving Hollywood infinitely more credit than it deserves. Nope. It's the girl we know almost nothing about (she's General Dreykov's daughter, and that's it) and have no connection to, who somehow survived a point-blank explosion as a child. An adult doing that is unbelievable enough, but if you know anything about force distribution and surface area, a child surviving a building-destroying explosion that goes off in their face is just stupidly, Michael Bayishly impossible. Then you add in the old Spider-Man: Homecoming gripe about how Taskmaster's photographic muscle memory was reduced from a natural, totally plausible human ability, to "what if Darth Vader jacked into the Matrix?" Yeah. Apparently the MCU Taskmaster is a program rather than a person: the culmination of that floppy disk our "family" stole at the beginning of the movie, and the creepy Winstonean bastard behind the Red Room turned his burned-alive daughter into a cyborg and jacked the Taskmaster program into her spine so he could use her as an assassination tool of last resort. And they don't even use it that much. She throws the shield a few times, and there's a cool shot of her, face-to-face with Natasha, doing mirrored "superhero landing" poses (Yelena makes fun of this constantly throughout the film, by the way). But there really wasn't that moment of "OMG! She can do everything I can do, but better, and she can counter it, too! We have to be unpredictable and work together to defeat her!" It's cliche, I know. But that didn't keep me from feeling like it was missing. Hell, the final battle was missing. There were some spectacular setpieces and stunts in the third act, of course. But amid all of the explosions, running, and leaps of faith, it was like, with Dreykov dead and the Widow squad exposed to the antidote, there was nothing left to fight but the scenery.
I have other gripes about Black Widow, like how I had to spend thirty dollars to be able to watch it on its release date on Disney+ (neither theatre tickets, nor physical copies for any previous MCU film, have ever cost that much), or how the "family" are dug in and indoctrinated and hate each other one minute, but are working together and joking back and forth like an established team the next with not a second of explanation in between. I get that they spent their early days together living as a family, but twenty years have gone by since then. Now, Yelena thinks Natasha is a soft sellout, Red Guardian has spent most of his life post-mission arm-wrestling and reliving his glory days in a gulag, and Melina has been working her way up the ranks of Dreykov's organization and training potbellied pigs (one of which she named after Red Guardian, by the way) to stop breathing on command. So to go from that, and Melina betraying her "family," to Mission Impossible face-swapping and coordinated escape efforts like it was the plan from the beginning, with only THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP and BECAUSE SPIES to go on...not even the Hulk's purple pants stretch that much. Also, get your mountain-to-avalanche ratios right, people.
I think I was trying to cut things short and talk about what works in Black Widow's favor, but ironically, it didn't work. So let's fix that. David Harbour is a joy as Dad Bod Captain Russia. I think he was also supposed to be shooting Stranger Things 4 (the teaser showed Hopper alive and working in a Soviet prison camp in Siberia) at the same time, so just seeing that he was Red Guardian in this made me squeal like a fanboy with diminished testosterone. The hand-to-hand combat, while featuring a lot of cuts to obscure the use of stuntpeople, is pretty good. The Russian accents, not including Ray Winstone because his Winstonean accent was too strong, are commendably consistent. The action setpieces are done as Marvel does best. The witty banter (while repetitive and annoying at times), is also done as close as Marvel could get to their best. And the post-credits scene (remember that SPOILER cameo from Falcon & the Winter Soldier?) does a great job of setting up the Hawkeye series.
A strong case can be made here for Marvel setting up either the Thunderbolts (William Hurt has a cameo in this as T-bolt Ross) or the Dark Avengers, with White Vision, Loki, Sylvie, Yelena, Taskmaster, and US Agent being introduced through this film and the last three streaming series. But with Billy and Tommy, Kid Loki, Yelena again, Kate Bishop (whom True Grit's Haylee Steinfeld is set to play in Hawkeye), Ms. Marvel (her own streaming series and/or movie is forthcoming), a potential Miles Morales introduction, an Ironheart miniseries planned, and Kang the Conqueror confirmed (who has a Variant that is a young Tony Stark in the comics), they could just as well be setting up Young Avengers, albeit in the longer term.

There was a lot wrong with Black Widow, but there was also enough to enjoy about it. It kind of had the same feel as Thor: The Dark World, building lore, finishing up some loose ends for a beloved character before she becomes a Belova'd character, looking cool, and being funny, but ultimately not saying or doing much of real consequence. It was a movie about trained killers that turned out mostly harmless. If you must watch it now, look it up at your local theater and spend your thirty on overpriced junk food. Otherwise, wait until October to stream it with the rest of the financially intelligent world.

Ticketmaster,
Out.