Director Cate Shortland
Starring Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh & David Harbour
Rated M
Score 2.5/6

Natasha Romanoff aka Black Widow confronts the darker parts of her ledger when a dangerous conspiracy with ties to her past arises. Pursued by a force that will stop at nothing to bring her down, Natasha must deal with her history as a spy and the broken relationships left in her wake long before she became an Avenger.

Okay, the Black Widow movie has finally been released. I suppose this probably should have been the next movie released after Avengers: Age of Ultron. Though it should be noted that supposedly Lionsgate had plans for a Black Widow movie back in 2005. Is Black Widow impressive by MCU standards? Perhaps not. The filmmakers clearly were going for something different, but they also needed to deliver a big loud action movie or a well-paced spy movie. They did not. What they delivered was watchable. However, I have a feeling that Black Widow is going to be left in the middle of the list of the ever-expanding Marvel cinematic universe, though if you listen to what some of the YouTube critics have to say about Black Widow, this is going to be one of the movies that is forgotten about entirely.
For those of you who want to be in the right frame of mind before they see Black Widow keep in mind that it is set after Captain America: Civil War, but before Avengers: Infinity War.
I liked the opening act of the movie which explored Natasha Romanoff’s childhood, the movie explained a lot more about Black Widow which made her seem like a more fleshed out character and I also loved the action sequence with the plane in the opening act. I thought that Florence Pugh gave a decent enough performance as Yelena Belova but I couldn’t shake the feeling that Scarlett Johansson was on auto-pilot with her performance and at best gave a bland performance. A lot of the dialogue especially the conversations between Yelena and Natasha felt that it would be better suited for an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I was a little surprised to see that Ray Winstone was cast as Dreykov, he is capable of being a great tough guy but here he was just a bad casting choice.