Director – Cate Shortland – 2021 – US, UK – Cert. 12a – 133m
****
Marvel’s latest is less about mysterious former spy Black Widow than the relationship between her and her younger sister – out in cinemas on Wednesday, July 7th
The nuclear family of a father, mother and two young daughters growing up in Ohio in the mid-1990s turns out not to be a nuclear family at all but a man, a woman and two unsuspecting children planted there to look like one by mysterious Russian organisation the Red Room. Natasha (Ever Anderson) is both highly competitive with and protective of her little sister Yelena (Violet McGraw). When someone gets hurt, their mother Melina (Rachel Weisz) is always there for comfort and support.
“You remember how we said one day we’d have an adventure?” says dad Alexei (David Harbour). “Well, that day has come.” He has the only remaining copy of computer files on a disc. There’s an hour to pack before first police cars then S.H.I.E.L.D. SUVs turn up looking for them. By the time the SUVs find them, the family are busy taking off in a private plane from a hidden airfield. When they reach Cuba, the mother is dying from a bullet wound while the father is revealed as a mercenary, happy to see the two children who aren’t actually their daughters at all sedated and taken away after the older Natasha has pulled a gun on her ‘dad’. “That one has fire in her”, says one of his accomplices approvingly.
Jump forward 21 years. Evading the pursuit of Secretary Of State Ross (a briefly seen William Hurt), the grown up Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) follows a package of vials containing a mysterious red gas from Norway to Budapest where she runs into, fights then teams up with her equally grown up sister Yelena (Florence Pugh). This extraordinary fight scene swiftly turns from a John Woo-style Mexican stand-off into a combat sequence with an unmistakable, domestic backdrop as the pair kick and punch their way through first a kitchen then a living room. According to the press handouts, this was one of the production’s first scenes to be shot. The extreme physicality of the scene’s largely effects-free acting / performing / stunt work by the pair seems to have worked wonders for their subsequent performances in this film.
After this, the pair feature both together and separately throughout, sometimes the latter when you expect the former. One of the set pieces involves them springing their ‘father’ (now sporting the visible muscle of the stereotyped heavy) from prison. It involves winter, walkways, a helicopter, dangling from a rope, climbing and, for the finale, an avalanche. Although the two are together in the scene, they’re actually separate as one storyline has their ‘father’ trying to reach upper walkways or the roof to be picked up, a second has Yelena flying the plane (at one point, stretching credulity even further than most of the action by leaving the pilot’s seat to fire an over the shoulder missile to blow up a tower – causing the avalanche) and Natasha dangling on a rope trying to facilitate the escape of her father.
This is the point in the review where I invoke Police Story III: Super Cop (Stanley Tong, 1992) in which Jackie Chan dangles from a rope ladder above Kuala Lumpur for real and the effect is absolutely electrifying – no CGI or optical trickery back then, the tools which at once allow today’s Hollywood effects movies to achieve the incredible onscreen whilst simultaneously reducing those actions to the level of banality because the audience knows them not to be real.
As in other MCU Avengers outings, the more the special effects are piled on to the action, the less believable the sequences become and the less the audience cares. (For that opening fight between the two sisters, you absolutely will care, you’ll be on the edge of your seat.) Towards the end as assorted characters fall from a location in the sky (something I seem to remember happening in at least one previous Avengers movie), there’s a moment when Natasha falls through the open side door of an aircraft and out the other side – there’s something about the preposterous, couldn’t possibly be real element that numbs the audience, and that happens a lot in the big set piece which constitutes much of last half hour or so. Such sequences probably need to be seen on the biggest IMAX screen you can find (the film was shown to press on a medium-sized screen which almost certainly reduced their impact considerably, powerful though they were even on an average-sized screen).
It’s not all bad, though. If director Cate Shortland sometimes gets swamped by the sheer scale of the action – not that the same thing hasn’t happened to other directors in numerous other Marvel outings – her considerable abilities at expressing and exploring character, backstory and peril (Lore, 2012, Berlin Syndrome, 2017) serve the film well. The two sisters’ interaction in the same screen space forms the spine of the film and is something very special (including the early scenes where they’re young children played by child actors). Even though the girls and the mother and father are not a blood family, Shortland manages to further explore the family dynamic whenever she brings the mother and / or father into the frame too. Unlike the Fast & Furious films, there’s no glib banging on about “family” here while the mayhem is ramped up and this element is genuinely affecting even as the narrative probes and questions whether these four people were ever really a family at all.
It will come as no surprise to anyone who saw her in Lady Macbeth (William Oldroyd, 2016) that Pugh makes a terrific Yelena, which is just as well since it turns out the narrative is not about Natasha so much as about the two sisters. Pugh gives Marvel veteran Johansson a run for her money, the sparks between the pair bringing a very necessary overall tension to the piece. Cate Shortland has chosen well in her casting here, with the two actresses’ double act arguably the film’s greatest asset.
Ray Winstone plays the villain Dreykov, a name sounding suspiciously like the unpleasant student Draco from Harry Potter, who runs a veritable army of Black Widows from the aforementioned Red Room. To cut a long story short, he controls the minds of these highly trained female combatants. They can only be released from his will by exposure to the red gas. His best fighter wears a distinctive suit of body armour and is blessed with the ability to mimic the fighting moves of any adversary, something which doesn’t work particularly well on screen (although the fight scenes in which this character appears are impressive enough so it’s unlikely anyone will care).
Melina, meanwhile, turns out to be a scientist who lives on a farm somewhere in Russia and does a nice line in mind control on pigs. A further character is introduced in the form of Mason (O-T Fagbenle) as Natasha’s requisitions man who can deliver her any aircraft or anything else she wants at very short notice. All this plot, however, feels like a sideshow compared to Johansson and Pugh who between them walk away with the film and, alongside Shortland’s ability to mine emotion from strained relationships, are the reason to go and see it.
Black Widow is out in cinemas in the UK on Wednesday, July 7th.
Trailer: