Girls allowed
BLACK WIDOW
12A ★★★ In cinemas and on Disney+ now
After appearing in seven Avengers movies, Scarlett Johansson’s Russian action heroine finally gets a solo movie. Here we learn how Natasha Romanoff, who was killed off in the last Avengers film, became the haunted former assassin known as Black Widow.
The main action takes place after 2016’s Captain America: Civil War as the outlawed Avenger uses her time on the run to confront her past.
An opening flashback to 1995 reveals a young Natasha was part of a sleeper cell of
Russian agents and hiding in suburban Ohio with her fake parents (David Harbour and Rachel Weisz) and an orphan who unwittingly played her younger sister Yelena.
As gunfire rages, the spies make their escape to a sloweddown cover of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit (will breathy singers ever leave the 90s alone?).
When we jump forward 21 years, Natasha is on the trail of Dreykov (Ray Winstone, still rubbish at accents), the Russian general who turned Natasha and her “sister” into chemically controlled assassins after they fled America.
After reuniting with Yelena (Florence
Pugh), they track down their fake mum and dad and set off to take down Dreykov, battle his cyborg assassin Taskmaster and free the rest of Dreykov’s brainwashed drones with a mind-freeing drug.
There’s amusing banter for Pugh and Johansson, and Harbour hams it up as nicely as a former Soviet superhero who has gone to seed. But attempts to add shade to Natasha’s character are always interrupted by the next action scene.
The finale, another airborne scrap with things blowing up, is well staged but familiar. Black Widow is an entertaining diversion and an opportunity missed.
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She’s on the trail of the Russian general who made her an assassin