Black Widow (2021)
(Disney Streaming, October 2021) Considering that Black Widow led to an unusually high-profile profit-sharing lawsuit between star Scarlett Johansson and studio Disney, it can be amusing to refer to it as a contractual obligation on all sides. On Johansson’s side, it was seen as correcting an embarrassing oversight—finally, a standalone film for the sole first-wave female Avenger, even if it meant going back in time prior to the character’s death. It also fits within the Marvel desire to diversify its offerings beyond the all-white, all-male focus of its early films. So that’s how we end with a flashback story in which we follow the Black Widow character in between two previous films, tracking her efforts to reunite with characters from her past and take down another villain along the way. Stemming from the character’s past as a deep-cover agent in the United States, the first two thirds of the film present themselves as a spy adventure with occasional intrusion from the superhero world, only to flip squarely in the superhero “battle in a floating enemy base” mould by the end. But in fulfilling a contractual obligation to Johansson, her character, and fans, Black Widow ends up being a contractual obligation for viewers as well. Tangentially fitting within the overall continuity of the MCU (although the film is a successful feature-length audition for Florence Pugh to take up the character’s mantle going forward—in other words, a character’s introduction… and a hint toward Captain America being present in the 1980s), it feels like a sideshow in more ways than one. The links to the MCU are slight, the story is lower-profile, and the stakes are trivial until they get kicked up to world-changing status in time for the switch to superhero mode. There are several head-scratchers stemming from lazy storytelling and retroactively trying to fit something in the continuity. So, basically—Black Widow is a lower-tier Marvel film, perhaps the dullest since, oh, Thor: The Dark World. (I had similar concerns about Captain Marvel and Doctor Strange, but both of those had some great narrative hooks to go along with the familiar formula.) It’s technically the first of the Phase Four MCU films, but the setting in between other Phase Three films makes it feel like it belongs to the earlier phase. Considering that the Marvel creative team is putting pieces on the checkerboard for years of post-Thanos storylines, it’s not a bad time to fulfill those contractual obligations, introduce new characters, do a bit of housecleaning, rebalance the diversity ratios and have a breather episode. At this stage, even an underwhelming Marvel film is sufficiently comfortable to deliver on basic points of popular entertainment: evocative character work, competent actors, slick production values and kinetic action sequences. It all feels very familiar, but comforting at the same time: another contractual obligation to deliver what the audience expected. I expect the film to end up being a small sideshow to the MCU—the kind of instalment that, in a few years, will be flow-charted as one of the optional entries in the canon, for completists and fans of the character only. Until then, well, there’s already Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings in theatres and Eternals a few weeks away from release, so there’s always something else in the pipeline.
