Black Widow

I have nothing against strong female characters who can have men for dinner, as long as they are believable and have some logical basis in the story, but when the core of the villain organization is skinny teenage girls (in other words, 40 kg in wet clothes) who are supposed to take over the world, I do have a problem. Not to mention that the pheromone idea is straight out of my own teenage attempts at literature when I was trying to write science fiction stories. So I'm thinking, Kevin Feige, do you want to hire me as a screenwriter? A little extra money would be nice :o) (27/07/2021)

After almost two years, a Marvel movie finally hit the cinemas and the result is nothing to write home about. For me, a pretty useless movie about a useless character. The first hour is surprisingly solid, it's well paced, the action is kept down to earth and the fights have decent choreography – they're Bourne style so I enjoyed them. I'm also pleased with Florence Pugh, whom I like a lot, and the Taskmaster's entrance is awesome. By the second hour, however, I felt that perhaps the director had been replaced, the action goes by the wayside, and so does the fun goes, the humour is completely absent, the Taskmaster goes by the wayside! (it's reprehensible to sideline such an interesting villain like that!), and the finale was perhaps the weakest of all the action scenes, so I'm quite disappointed. I rate the first half as 8/10, the second half is about 5-6, and in the end I'm rounding up more towards 6, because for Marvel I found it unbalanced, the effects aren't too dazzling either, it felt a bit like it was going half throttle and quite possibly the first Marvel movie I definitely won't watch again. Story 3/5, Action 3/5, Humor 1/5, Violence 0/5, Fun 3/5 Music 2/5, Visuals 3/5, Atmosphere 3/5, Suspense 3/5. 6/10. (21/07/2021)

The first half is great, it has a dark intro, raw, tight fights and great eye candy FX moments (the chimney scene, WOW!). I almost wouldn't be afraid to say that the first ten minutes not only form a decent backdrop for the origin of a character we don't really know much about, but it also has the emotional edge and directness that was so very good in Winter Soldier, for example. But once it swings into the second part, it becomes more of a comedy, because as it’s usual with comic-book films, few and far between don't go "check all the boxes" style – or rather, they have to please everyone. And so suddenly, the deadly serious-looking film becomes almost a merry-go-round, and it's completely buried from the higher rungs by the insanely over-the-top finale. Florence Pugh is the best, the characters are OK overall, just a bit messily put together. It still has the hallmarks of a bombastic high budget film, but in this version it could have come before the battle and not after. (13/07/2021)

Marvel has been just spinning the same formula for some time, and so is now trying to make up for their past with a lot of catching up to do, ripping off everything from The Bourne Identity to the underrated Bond movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service. All this is done in such a lackluster manner which is so bland and stupid that it is bound to disappoint die-hard fans of this superhero franchise. The screenplay is not as cheap and crappy as in Captain Marvel, yet it is still completely pointless and a lame bare popcorn movie. (15/07/2021)

I was thrilled, about halfway through. Black Widow starts as an unexpectedly dark and adult comic book movie, presenting broken and hesitant heroes and heroines instead of jokes, and surprisingly gritty action that doesn't deny that the creators took inspiration from Jason Bourne and Mission: Impossible. It's also humorless, and for a while it felt like the most mature Marvel movie ever, unafraid of themes you wouldn't quite expect to find there. But then, somehow, it breaks. Halfway through, it's as if the makers decided that their audience probably doesn't actually crave something like this and went back to their old ways of playing it safe, give or take. Black Widow does even that well, and when you take away the not-so-good contact action scenes and the weaker Taskmaster, it's at least a solid job and an inoffensive Marvel average. It just felt a little too little when they went with a more mature yet fully functioning style in the first part. I don't want to make it sound like Black Widow is a bad movie. It's a well-done comic-book routine, but as a viewer, I'm not completely satisfied with that anymore. Especially when Scarlet Johansson and her crew managed to show me that they can do better. (08/07/2021)