Black Widow is a 2021 American superhero film built on the Marvel Comics character of the same name. Cate Shortland directed it. Eric Pearson wrote the screenplay, with Jac Schaeffer and Ned Benson also contributing. Scarlett Johansson plays Natasha Romanoff, the former KGB assassin and S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who spent a decade as a supporting player in the Marvel Cinematic Universe before getting a film of her own.
It is the 24th MCU entry, produced by Marvel Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. It runs 134 minutes. Shortland has called it the most violent Marvel film so far, and she put her emphasis on the fight sequences. That is not a throwaway line. The fights are the spine of the picture.
Trailer, via Marvel Entertainment.
Natasha Romanoff on the Run
Most of the film sits inside the events of Captain America: Civil War (2016). Romanoff is a fugitive for violating the Sokovia Accords. She breaks away from U.S. Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross, played by William Hurt, and holes up in a Norway safehouse supplied by Rick Mason, played by O-T Fagbenle.
That opening stretch is the cleanest thing in the movie. A woman alone, hunted by her own government, hiding in a country that is not hers.
Johansson has described the setup as a chance to show Romanoff as “a woman who has come into her own and is making independent and active choices for herself”. She is right that the opportunity is there. The film is less steady about using it.
Shortland has said Romanoff’s ambiguous psychological journey was the center of the story. Pearson has said the film would show her become the “more emotional, vulnerable and at peace” version of the character audiences met in Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019).
Because Romanoff dies in Endgame, Johansson has said Black Widow let her leave the MCU “on a high note” and that her work playing the character was complete. That is an odd brief. You are building a prequel around someone the audience already knows is gone, and you are doing it to close a story rather than open one.
The Family in Ohio
The film opens in 1995. Super soldier Alexei Shostakov and Black Widow assassin Melina Vostokoff pose as a married couple in Ohio, with Natasha Romanoff and Yelena Belova as their daughters. They steal S.H.I.E.L.D. intel and get out to Cuba, where their boss, General Dreykov, has the two girls taken to the Red Room for training as Widows.
David Harbour plays Alexei. Rachel Weisz plays Melina. Ever Anderson plays young Natasha, and Violet McGraw plays young Yelena. Anderson speaks Russian, and her taekwondo and gymnastics training helped her in the part.
The fake-family prologue is the best idea in the film. It gives the later reunion a wound to press on. Decades pass. Shostakov ends up in a Russian prison. Romanoff and Belova become successful, dangerous assassins. Romanoff defects to S.H.I.E.L.D. after helping Clint Barton bomb Dreykov’s Budapest office, which apparently kills Dreykov and his young daughter Antonia.
Yelena Belova and the Red Room
Florence Pugh plays Yelena Belova, a sister to Romanoff who was trained in the Red Room as a Black Widow. Johansson has said Belova was an early inclusion who could stand on her own alongside Romanoff. Pugh has described the generational gap between them, calling Belova “unapologetic, and confident in herself, and curious… and emotionally brave”.
That is the performance the film is built on, and Pugh earns it. She has said she admired Belova’s bluntness and determination, and noted the character is a skilled fighter who does not know how to live a normal life. Shortland has said Romanoff would be handing the baton to Belova. During filming, Pugh looked to Johansson for guidance on what a Marvel shoot demands.
Johansson wanted to avoid an antagonistic dynamic between the two. That choice pays off. The sisters bicker like people who were children together, which is the point.
Belova kills a rogue former Widow but comes into contact with a synthetic gas that neutralizes the Red Room’s chemical mind-control agent. She sends antidote vials to Romanoff, hoping she and the Avengers can free the other Widows, and goes into hiding. Romanoff is unknowingly driving with the vials in her car when Red Room agent Taskmaster attacks her. She escapes and works out that the vials came from Budapest.
“Her world. Her secrets. Her legacy.”
That is the tagline, and it is doing more work than the film sometimes does. Budapest is where she finds Belova, who reveals that Dreykov is alive and the Red Room is still running. Ray Winstone plays Dreykov. Widows and Taskmaster attack them, but Romanoff and Belova evade them and meet with Mason, who supplies them with a helicopter.
Alexei, Melina and the Farm Outside Saint Petersburg
Romanoff and Belova break Shostakov out of prison to learn Dreykov’s location. He directs them to Vostokoff, who lives on a farm outside Saint Petersburg. There she is refining the chemical mind control process used on the Widows. Vostokoff alerts Dreykov, and his agents arrive to take them.
The prison break is where Harbour gets to be funny, and the farm is where Weisz gets to be unsettling. Both are welcome. The film has a habit of relaxing just when it should be tightening. The middle section sags under its own exposition. The cast keeps it upright.
Olga Kurylenko plays Antonia, also known as Taskmaster. Ryan Kiera Armstrong plays young Antonia. Liani Samuel plays Lerato. The Taskmaster reveal is the film’s biggest swing, and it lands harder than the marketing let on.
The Long Road to Production
The project’s history runs back further than most of the MCU. Lionsgate Films started developing a Black Widow film in April 2004, with David Hayter attached to write and direct. It did not move forward, and the character’s film rights had reverted to Marvel Studios by June 2006.
Johansson was cast in the role for several MCU films beginning with Iron Man 2 (2010), and began discussing a solo film with Marvel. Work began in late 2017, and Shortland was hired in July 2018. Schaeffer and Benson contributed to the script before Pearson joined.
Filming took place from May to October 2019 in Norway, among other locations. The film was written to be a prequel that expands on Romanoff’s history and helps end her MCU story following the character’s death in Avengers: Endgame.
What the Film Gets Right
Here is the ranking that matters. Black Widow works best in this order:
- The Ohio prologue and the fake-family premise, which gives every later scene a bruise to touch.
- Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova, who walks off with the movie and makes the handoff feel earned.
- The fight sequences, which Shortland treats as the main event rather than punctuation.
- The Budapest and Red Room material, which is efficient but over-explained.
- The Taskmaster reveal, which is a good idea delivered too late to change the shape of the film.
That is a strong top three. It is also a list that tells you where the movie’s center of gravity actually sits. It is not Romanoff. It is the family she was assigned, and the sister she did not choose.
The Ledger and the Baton
The film’s stated purpose is to expand on Romanoff’s history and help end her MCU story. It does the second job better than the first. We learn what we need to know about the Red Room and Dreykov, but the character’s interior life stays sketched. Shortland has said her ambiguous psychological journey was the center of the story. Ambiguous is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence.
What the film does have is Johansson, who has played this role since 2010 and knows how little she needs to do. She plays Romanoff as tired, competent, and out of practice at being a person. It is the most controlled work in the movie.
The film sits at 6.8 out of 10 across published critical scores, with a Metacritic score of 68 out of 100. That is a fair number. It reflects a movie better than the worst of the MCU’s solo outings and short of the best, a film that knows its job and does most of it.
The part worth watching is not the conspiracy or the antidote vials or the flying fortress. It is the dinner table. Four people who once pretended to be a family, sitting across from each other years later, still performing. That is the movie Black Widow could have been all the way through. It gets there in pieces.
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