The Black Widow movie was too little, too late

Instead, Marvel just released the movie they wished they released in 2016 with zero acknowledgement of how weird that is, which feels like its own insult to the character. It’s impossible to imagine Marvel sticking Tony Stark in a post-Endgame movie that just flashed back to some random adventure he had in 2018. But because Nat is “the girl,” there’s this assumption that her arc doesn’t really matter. It was sexism that kept Marvel from releasing a Black Widow movie at a time when that would have made sense for her story. And it was a fear of being seen as sexist that forced Marvel to finally give her a solo outing as a last-minute add-on.

Black Widow plays best for those who aren’t hugely invested in Marvel’s cinematic universe concept. On its own, it’s a competent enough spy movie with a fun supporting cast, a reliable Johansson performance, some vaguely compelling action set pieces, and an earnest female-empowerment angle. The concept of giving Nat a family—or, rather, a fake Russian spy family she lived with for three years when she was a kid—is clever and lets David Harbour’s Alexei “Red Guardian” Shostakov and Rachel Weisz’s Melina “super scientist” Vostokoff join Pugh in the scene-stealing department. For those who just want a lightly Marvel-fied riff on Mission: Impossible or Bourne, Black Widow is a fine way to spend 134 minutes. 

As someone who spent 10 years deeply invested in Natasha Romanoff’s arc, however, the whole thing felt like a letdown—much more so than her controversial death in Endgame. One of the skills I learned early in life as a little girl who loved genre stuff was the ability to invest in characters who aren’t the lead of the series. Every Marvel movie where Black Widow appears is basically a Black Widow movie to me, to the point where I can’t relate when people describe her as an inconsistent side character. 

Apart from her godawful romance with Bruce Banner in Age Of Ultron, there’s more consistency than not across Nat’s eight cinematic appearances. Beneath her dry sense of humor and sexy double-agent schtick, she’s actually a deeply loyal, principled person. She didn’t just join the Avengers, she actively helped form the team. And she’s always the one trying to hold the group together—whether that’s leading the crew with Steve at the end of Age Of Ultron or running Avengers Compound in Endgame. 

The magic of Johansson’s performance is how she portrays Nat as someone who’s cynically pragmatic on the outside, but compassionate underneath; a woman whose experience with loneliness and isolation fuels a deep empathy for others. You can see that in her distress when she thinks Nick Fury has died in Winter Soldier, her warmth with Hawkeye’s family in Age Of Ultron, and even the way she attends Peggy Carter’s funeral just so Steve won’t have to be alone in Civil War. In between all of Black Widow’s wry quips and overtly badass moments, there’s real vulnerability to her characterization—whether she’s quivering in fear from the Hulk in Avengers or tearfully biting into a peanut butter sandwich in Endgame. If you track her biggest emotional scenes across the MCU, you can find the story of a lost, troubled woman longing for purpose, who found it in being a superhero. 

The biggest problem with the Black Widow movie is that it doesn’t do much to add to or complicate our understanding of the character, which is ideally what a solo movie should do. Though Eric Pearson’s script ostensibly circles back around to close the loop on a bunch of threads mentioned in past movies (Dreykov’s daughter and a Budapest mission from Avengers, the Red Room from Age Of Ultron), there’s nothing that moves the needle on who Nat is as a person. Her arc is already complete. So instead of growing and changing like a traditional Marvel hero, she’s just a character who exists at the center of the film as a lot of plot and ensemble stuff swirls around her. 

In fact, if we really want to get in the weeds on the time-hopping shenanigans, I think it would’ve made way more sense to set this movie after Winter Solider, in which Nat’s entire identity is destabilized with the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. and she ends the movie as a literal free agent. (“I blew all my covers, I gotta go figure out a new one.”) How she got from there to Age Of Ultron feels like untapped storytelling ground. By Civil War, however, she’s so deeply enmeshed in the Avengers and so specifically loyal to Steve Rogers that there’s no question where she’s headed as the credits roll. Ostensibly, Nat spends the Black Widow movie learning that she shouldn’t abandon her friends during their fracture because even dysfunctional families can make it work. Only, that’s a question no one was asking, and one we already know the answer to.

Instead, the biggest innovation of Black Widow is surrounding Natasha with other female characters for once, which is a nice touch. Though she has a bunch of compelling relationships within the Avengers lineup, she’s pretty much exclusively surrounded by men. So it’s refreshing that Black Widow lets her bounce off Yelena as a clingy, lovable little sister and Melina as a complicated maternal figure. Yet it’s also telling that those women get bigger arcs in relation to Natasha than she gets in relation to them. Marvel would clearly rather use Black Widow‘s screentime to launch new characters than flesh out the one they know is leaving. 

Nat’s lack of an arc ties into how the movie handles its action. Though director Cate Shortland brings more visual cohesion than you often get in a Marvel project, the spy-infused action loses sight of what Marvel usually does well, which is build character through fight scenes. (Think of Captain America perpetually refusing to give up or Carol Danvers learning to embrace the fullness of her abilities.) In past MCU projects, we understood who Nat is based on the way she keeps taking on bigger threats in The Avengers or the way she looks out for Scarlet Witch on the battlefield in Infinity War. Because Black Widow pulls from the Mission: Impossible playbook, however, the action sequences are more about looking cool in isolation than fueling character. A giant snowy prison break is just there for spectacle. 

The closest the movie gets to character-based action are the two sequences built around Natasha and Yelena’s relationship: a Killing Eve-esque apartment fight when they first meet, and Natasha risking her own life to save her sister in the airborne finale. But that compelling interpersonal story winds up playing second fiddle to a #MeToo-inspired plot about Nat overthrowing the torturous training program that raised her. And while there’s some promise to the idea of three generations of Widows and one disgruntled state-sponsored super-soldier teaming up to take down the Red Room, the movie has to rely on too many shortcuts to create a problem it can resolve in just two hours. 

Pearson’s script reimagines the Widow program as chemical mind-control that can be instantly reversed with a special synthetic gas. And it roots all the villainy in a man named Dreykov (Ray Winstone) and his evil iPad. Unfortunately, “kill one bad guy and spray some ladies in the face” isn’t a particularly impactful metaphor for ending systemic abuse, especially when Natasha’s non-chemical-brainwashing was a more potent allegory for living with trauma. So Black Widow winds up feeling well-intentioned but pretty hollow, like one of those Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. episodes that pretended to have an impact on the wider MCU. 

Weirdly, the Marvel project that actually grappled with Natasha’s life in the most meaningful way is the Disney+ TV show Hawkeye, in which Pugh returned with an even stronger performance to hash things out with Jeremy Renner’s Clint Barton. That show settles on the idea that Nat sacrificed herself to save the world (something she was willing to do all the way back in Age Of Ultron) and that her legacy now lives on in the people who loved her, which is a hell of a lot better than how Endgame or Black Widow memorialized her. It’s just a bummer that a founding member of the MCU and a trailblazer for 2010s female superheroes never got to take center stage—even in her own movie. 

Next time: A trio of ’70s icons got a contemporary makeover in 2000’s Charlie’s Angels