Starring Scarlet Johansson, Florence Pugh, Ray Winstone, David Harbour, Rachel Weisz

Directed by Cate Shortland

Disney, out now and on premium Disney+

 

Natasha Romanov discovers that the past resolutely refuses to stay buried.

Arguably five years too late. Black Widow and Scarlett Johansson needed this movie quite a long time ago – after Captain America: Civil War to be honest, which is when the film is set.

It is inexplicable to me that the film didn’t arrive sooner and one can only assume studio cowardice to bet a female led movie could hold the box office. Which is a massive shame as others (not least Wonder Woman) have blazed that trail now.

It’s also a shame because, as far as things go, no one needed this backstory film to be made at this point – it does nothing to advance the universe Marvel have created and doesn’t even act as a goodbye for the character who is now, canonically, dead.

However. And it’s a big however. The film is glorious. Its aesthetic is lushly Cold War inspired, less All the President’s Men and more You Only Live Twice or Moonraker, complete with secret hideouts, physics defying stunts and those peculiar American tropes about old Russian men and their obsessions.

In other respects, this is a film to give Fast and the Furious 9 a run for its money in laying down family as the solution to all problems. Unstoppable killing machines? Family. Mind control? Family. Falling from the sky without a parachute? Family.

That and the physics defying stunts and situations. Like F9, it borrows heavily from The A Team stable of cars rolling over and people getting out of them with nothing more than a headache.

The thing is the movie loves all these elements and so they arrive into your eyes with love and care and attention. When Natasha and her ‘sister’ both have shots of them running with the world exploding behind them within thirty seconds of each other you’re not rolling your eyes, you’re cheering them on and revelling in the absurd championing of much ridiculed clichés.

And all of this with women squarely centred at its heart enjoying all the leeway normally given to male protagonists.

Just as with old fashioned spy movies there’s travelogue as they zoom around the world from city to city, to secret prisons, to beaches and to castles in the sky. There are gadgets and weird enemies to fight. The goons are all wearing masks and die by the dozen and the chief henchman is an unstoppable killing machine.

Additionally, true to form, Team Bad Guy has no motivation other than being bad and having always been bad. Everyone else is co-opted or tricked (except for the goons who must have had a hell of a dental plan given what they’re prepared to suffer) or literally mind controlled into being bad.

The action sequences are so over the top they’re more purely comic book than almost anything else in the MCU. Yet Taskmaster isn’t ever really given much to do – they’re clearly unstoppable but no one properly fights them other than to try to get away or slow them down.

The chief baddie is similar – they chew scenery beautifully but that’s about it. They don’t really do anything – serving only to be the person against whom the heroes are setting themselves.

You could argue the film is more concerned about family, and again in parallel to F9, if by that you mean family can solve any problem in this universe, that is true. Yet there aren’t any moments of real pathos or poignancy both because we know no one can die but also because the film never slows down enough for the characters to properly discuss how they feel or relate to one another.

You could contrast Natasha quite nicely with Loki – both are loners at heart who’ve done dark things and both their solo stories focus on what it means to find people who mean something to them. However, Loki is given time to explore this – Natasha is not. She is forced to fight and jump and run while relying on James Bond quips to get her from one scene to the next.

If it sounds like I’m complaining… well I am, a bit. Overall I thought this was a great action movie but it’s no political thriller like The Winter Soldier. It is very much You Only Live Twice but it knows this and loves the fact – and it’s hard not to love it on that basis.

Verdict: As a standalone movie in the MCU it works well. It’s a shame it was delayed both by a studio that wasn’t confident of such a movie and then by the pandemic as that will undoubtedly blunt its impact, but I thought it was a great nod to classics in the super spy genre as well as being a lot of fun in its own right.

Rating? 8 Arm wrestlers out of 10.

Stewart Hotston