Black Widow review: The family bonding

Black Widow” begins in Ohio in the ’90s, Natasha is a brave and serious young girl who already has a hardened look in her eyes. She looks after her younger sister, Yelena, and suspiciously follows the lead of her parents, Melina and Alexei, who are actually spies posing as a married couple. Natasha, who has already started training at a secret Soviet boot camp named Red Room, turning young women into deadly agents, and the girls are taught to kill.

The main action of the film skips ahead to the time immediately following “Captain America: Civil War” (2016), when Natasha is a fugitive separated from the rest of the Avengers.  “Black Widow,” along with the current Disney+ series “Loki,” serves as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s most recent attempt at retroactively building character narratives and back stories. To bring down Dreykov and his Red Room, Natasha reluctantly joins forces including an older Yelena, who has found an antidote to the mind control.

For a story about a woman named after a deadly spider, “Black Widow” is surprisingly precious with its hero.  In a lot of ways “Black Widow” feels different from the usual M.C.U. An Avenger who has been afflicted with something of a savior complex, Natasha hopes to redeem the red in her ledger with good deeds but ends up sounding like the dull Dudley.

 The manipulation of young women, the kidnapping and murder missions with civilian casualties the film seems more like a Bond or Bourne movie, with a tacked-on moral about the importance of family, and it sits awkwardly with heavier themes.

Ms. Johansson’s Natasha is out there in the world with no guile, a powerful, fiercely earnest fighter who has suffered so many wounds of so many kinds that she doesn’t think she can feel anymore. (Spoiler alert: she’s wrong.) Ms. Pugh’s Yelena is dryly self-ironic, shrewd and very, very funny—a masterstroke of casting. Together they’re electrifying, and terrifically entertaining.

Smart, sexy and perfectly cast, Black Widow barely has a story to speak of but still manages to be a huge amount of fun. It may be understated compared with Endgame’s cosmic histrionics, but still feels worthy of the big screen. The MCU’s cinematic comeback is more thrilling than Godzilla, infinitely better than Infinite and gives F9 a run for its money. All thanks to four stars who nailed the assignment.