Well that was fun!!! (Loki)

Black Widow
Not worth 20 notes.

Black Widow......I agree with a lot of what monkey says.

Good way of getting people to pay the £20 rather than wait until October I suppose.

LivDiv wrote:

One thing in the movie of potential interest.

Spoiler:

The Red Whatever repeatedly claims of fighting Captian America and them being arch adversaries. While in prison a guy calls him on it saying he couldn't have as Cap was still frozen at the time.
However as we know now there were two Caps on a timeline. One frozen in ice and one returning the stones while getting Pegged by Carter.
These tales if true suggest Cap was actually quite active then and not just doing a quick job before retiring.

Could this open up a window for future Cap movies set during the Cold War?

This just makes me want a whole series of films about

So…Black Widow then.

This was…alright I suppose. By the end I was left reasonably entertained, but it’s very much B-Tier Mahvel.
Funnily enough, while I haven’t seen a single review either here or anywhere else that has much good to say about it, what’s perhaps more interesting is that few people seem to agree on what is actually so bad about it.
Whichever way you slice it though, that doesn't bode well, and ultimately it adds up to a film that’s never more than the sum of its divisive parts.

Me? I actually liked all the stuff that our Liv didn’t.
Enjoyed Harbour hamming it up. Enjoyed the family re-union scenes. Enjoyed the banter between the leads, and by the end, I’d completely disengaged my brain enough to enjoy the nonsensical final act. At least you can say that the money is on the screen.

The writing and direction by largely nameless jobbers are the real problems here though.
Thinly sketched on the back of a napkin over a boozy lunch, nothing makes a lick of sense, plot-holes abound everywhere you look, stakes are non-existent, and the film has terrible pacing issues.
This is really WW84 levels of incompetence in the creative departments, and it’s a crying shame, because Johansson and the rest of the excellent cast deserve so much better than this.

I thought the first hour of the film was rotten. Turgid stuff, with endless set-piece chase scenes that just don’t engage the viewer, because you’ve seen them all a million times before now, and as it’s the start of a film that’s introducing a tonne of new characters, we don’t get to know them, or get invested in their plight before we’re doing the endless runny runny chasey chasey punchy punchy stuff. It’s just hard to care about any of it, especially when so little of it makes any sense.

There’s a lot of really questionable ethical stuff that’s constantly just brushed over with witty lines or more punching, and it gives the front half of the film one hell of an identity crisis. A bit like saddling Jason Bourne with a comedy sidekick. It just doesn’t mesh together.

Where it does shine for me, is when it finally all slows down and the family re-unites for some witty banter. I liked all this stuff, and thought there was some great chemistry between the characters when they were finally allowed to interact with each other. Your mileage however, will probably vary.

The poorly conceived finale fumbles the ball to a great extent, but gets it over the line on ridiculous action spectacle alone, and I was left thinking, “Why did you do that? When you could have done this, or this or this, and it would have been so much better?”

Ultimately though, it’s a film out of time. Had it been released years ago in the wake of Civil War, I think it would have been looked on more favourably, but in 2021, it all just feels like a pointless afterthought that goes nowhere fast, and doesn’t even have an interesting story to tell to make it remotely worthwhile.
We know going in that Johansson is going to reach the end credits, but that’s no excuse for not exploiting this knowledge in other ways to make her journey more interesting. So yeah, big fail on the writing from Mahvel on this one, and they’re going to have to pull their socks up a fair bit moving forward, because so much of their recent output just feels like it’s coasting and directionless while they try to reposition the MCU for whatever direction the next phase is heading.

So, is it worth twenty of your English pounds?
Probably not.
It’s certainly not a disaster, and there is fun to be had, but this one isn’t terribly much fun, and it just doesn’t have a lot of meat on its bones.

As a final thought, if nothing else, you can always watch it and play The Black Widow Drinking Game. Every time there is a gratuitous female booty shot, take another drink.
Trust me, you’ll be comatose by the time the end credits roll.
...Which is actually really disappointing for a major film released in 2021, when you consider the current gender climate, and that this had a female director at the helm, and was executive produced by the massively A list female lead.
Mahvel, you need to be better than this. Now go and stand in the corner.

You could have told me the exact opposite fact and I would have believed you.
Its certainly no celebration of practical effects over digital.
There are some ropey bits of CG mind.

$200mil budget.

Ray Winestone's helicopter triple backflip kick was impressive.

Man, Ronin is so good.

Marvel needs more faith in both its actors and characters. We've had multiple actions movies - time to slow things down. Even in the TV shows, you get the feeling you know a fight scenes going to break out just for the sake of it.

I'm not saying there should be no action but given the bombast of the last of the infinity wars movie, the audience needs to come down off that sugar high so that we can build back to that.

That’s a nice interview, but there are no surprises in it. The design influences for the TVA are worn very much on the sleeve.

I did think they action was well staged. I just wasn't invested in much of it because NO STAKES.

Anyhoo...

Aye, it's certainly not bad, I just don't think it would have taken a superhuman amount of effort to make it a whole lot better. Decent enough fun, but a missed opportunity.

Yup.

Spoilers Frosty