ALSO SHOWING
Black Widow
✪✪✪
A Black Widow spin-off movie for Scarlett Johansson has been a long time coming given her status as the most prominent woman in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Having been killed off in the last Avengers film, though, her character’s eponymously titled solo outing is more swan-song than rebirth. Set between the events of Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War, the film starts promisingly enough with a mid-1990s prologue straight out of The Americans – the hit TV show about Russian sleeper cells living in suburban USA.
Previous Marvel films may have flashed back to Black Widow alterego Natasha Romanoff ’s teen years as part of a Soviet brainwashing programme, but here we get a thrillingly staged set-piece built around her fake American family’s cover being blown. As seen through the eyes of 13-year-old Natasha and her six-year-old adoptive sister, Yelena, their forced exodus to Cuba sets up the central dynamic of the film in high-octane style, allowing us to hit the ground running when we rejoin Natasha 21 years later as she’s exiled once more following the temporary disbanding of the Avengers. With Yelena (Florence Pugh) newly liberated from her chemically subjugated life as part of the same assassin programme that turned Natasha into such a lethal asset, it’s not long before the film brings these sort-of siblings back together to go after Dreykov (Ray Winstone), the sinister Russian supervillain who made them who they are.
Explicit nods to the Bourne movies, Mission: Impossible and Bond might suggest Black Widow doesn’t have much personality of its own, but that’s not strictly the case. Australian arthouse director Cate Shortland makes an admirable attempt to imbue proceedings with some of the lyricism of her earlier films (Somersault, Lore, Berlin Syndrome) and this, along with a storyline built
around women being chemically gaslit to do the bidding of powerful men, ensures that for a short while Black Widow looks and sounds unlike any other Marvel movie … until it does. At which point it becomes yet another chaotic, episodic mishmash of escalating CGI set-pieces that make little sense for a character with no actual superpowers. Which isn’t to say there’s no fun to be had. Johansson and Pugh’s repartee is pretty entertaining, but even here, franchise demands put such emphasis on grooming Pugh’s character for future instalments that Johansson can sometimes feel sidelined in her own movie. Black Widow deserved better.
(In cinemas and streaming on Disney+ with premier access)
The Tomorrow War (12) ✪✪
Johansson’s fellow MCU alumnus Chris Pratt continues his ongoing quest to become Kurt Russell with this ultra-cheesy sci-fi film that plugs his rugged, jokey, action-hero persona into a derivative story with derivative special effects. Pratt plays Dan Forester, an ex-soldier turned high school biology teacher whose desire to do something great with his life begins to be fulfilled when soldiers from the future interrupt the World Cup to inform everyone on the planet that an alien invasion will decimate the human population in 30 years time.
When world leaders respond by conscripting civilians into the military and time-warping them into the future, Dan – against the wishes of his wife and daughter – forgoes his teacher’s deferment and finds himself thriving in an environment that requires him to fight giant space bugs while cracking wise. But when an encounter with someone from his past ups the stakes, he has to go on a quest back in time to prevent this war from ever taking place. It’s all very silly, just not in an especially entertaining way.
(Amazon Prime)