![]() ![]() But the amount of fighting he gets to do is tiny, and the character is a joke that often falls flat. He has “KARL MARX” tattooed on his knuckles, and there’s a long comedy sequence of him trying to squeeze back into his costume. This is because, before he became a spy, Alexei was the Red Guardian, a sort of Soviet answer to Captain America. And he never gets the big fight he clearly wants. The prison breakout is cool, but the backstory for why he was there is just as flimsy. The act of espionage that made him flee the US is resolved in a couple of sentences of dialogue around the halfway mark. But the movie never knows what to do with Alexei. The equivalent depiction of Americanism might be someone trying to eat a cheeseburger and take a selfie at the same time on a motorcycle they’re driving with their elbows.ĭavid Harbour came to fame late, as pleasantly gruff small-town cop Jim Hopper on “Stranger Things.” The role asked of him here-to be middle-aged and burly- is not that different from the one that made him a star. It is my fervent hope that Russia makes films about Americans that are just as sloppy as “Black Widow” is about Russians.Īlexei, who spoke perfect English in the 1995 scene, is reintroduced with a deliriously fake accent in prison, where he’s simultaneously getting a tattoo and taking all comers in an arm-wrestling match. Nope! Just some down-time before the prison break-out. Perhaps the movie will question whether you can keep your humanity once you’ve done superhuman things. This, combined with the bracing physicality of the action sequences so far, creates the pleasant illusion that we’re watching a deconstruction of super-heroics. As Natasha patches herself up in the mirror at a store, Yelena sardonically comments that the superhuman members of the Avengers don’t need to do that. After fighting a masked super-soldier sent to steal a special chemical they have, they decide to get Alexei, who’s serving a life sentence in a Russian prison.įor a too-brief stretch, the story slims down to just the two step-sisters reconnecting after time spent apart. Natasha, aka Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson, reprising a role she’s had for a decade) is contacted by her stepsister, a fellow Russian-trained assassin (Yelena, played by Florence Pugh). The self-contained story is both confusing and heavy-handed. This puts “Black Window” right in the thick of the established Marvel continuity, which sometimes threatens to crowd out the film’s own plot. ![]() “Black Widow,” out now in Montpelier, might be the first entry by that name, but it’s a middle movie all the way through.Īfter an intro sequence in 1995, in which a surrogate family of Russian spies headed by Alexei (David Harbour) and Melina (Rachel Weisz) somehow escapes from Ohio to Cuba in a propeller plane, we’re dropped into 2016. The weakest are the middle movies that act as connective tissue. The former have the benefit of clean slates, the latter get to cash out years of narrative build-up. "This idea came about, and it was later in production or even in additional photography - right, Cate? - to showcase that moment that were pulled apart, what happened after the plane took off and character sent them back with Ray Winstone," said Feige.The strongest of Marvel’s superhero movies tend to be either first entries in the various sub-series or the big inflection-point installments (usually with “Avengers” in the title). military on its films.įor Black Widow, however, Feige and director Cate Shortland felt it was important to dive into the Red Room's sordid history for storytelling purposes. It's the sort of explicitly political commentary Marvel Studios has traditionally avoided, in no small part due to its longstanding practice of partnering with the U.S. President Bill Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin, implicating them in the crimes perpetrated by the Red Room's despicable leader. In an unexpectedly bold move, Black Widow's opening credits show Dreykov meeting with numerous real-world politicians, including former U.S. RELATED: Black Widow Arrived 5 Years Late, But It Fits Better in the MCU Now ![]()
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