Black Widow

Our Review

The prequel nobody demanded, arriving five years too late and one pandemic after it mattered. Black Widow is set immediately after Civil War, when Natasha Romanoff was the MCU’s most wanted fugitive, which means the film is a flashback for a character the franchise had already buried. Cate Shortland directs it as a spy family drama wearing superhero clothes, and that framing saves it from pointlessness.

The Ohio prologue, a suburban family that turns out to be three deep cover Russian agents and two stolen kids, is the strongest opening stretch of any Phase Four film. The fake family reunion in Budapest gives the movie its engine: Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova walking in with the film’s every good line, David Harbour’s Red Guardian desperate to be the dad of the group, Rachel Weisz doing sly science work in a pig farm’s basement laboratory.

Ray Winstone’s Dreykov, the trafficking kingpin running the Black Widow program, is a puny villain for a story about the program itself, and the CG freefall finale among exploding sky debris is Phase Four’s worst action climax, weightless in every sense. Taskmaster, one of comics’ best designs, gets wasted as a silent henchtwist.

Watch it for Pugh, who walked off with the franchise’s future. Our score: 5/10.