Black Widow (Cate Shortland, 2021)
It's okay. A few fun action setpieces, a couple of charming performances, and due to its odd status as a sort of midquel to Civil War, this is the first MCU production in years to not be swamped by self-congratulatory circlejerking about "blip blip blip Tony Tony Tony look at all this continuity let's play some clips from the previous movies," which is kind of refreshing. But this movie has some big problems. There's the action, for one thing. In the first act, all the action seems grittier and more lo-fi than is usual for the MCU. Characters slam each other into walls violently, they grab each other by the throat while their faces clench in pain, they gasp for breath as soon as the fighting is over, etc. But once the middle act rolls around, we're back to the more fanciful approach to action that's normal for the MCU, and now a kick from a normal woman launches people several feet backwards, a normal woman can survive being in a car that explodes and is launched a hundred feet with only minor cuts and bruises, and so on. I have no problem with maintaining a willing suspension of disbelief for a capeshit movie, or any action movie at all, but there has to be consistency. You can't just hop from one extreme to another.
And that's not all. The editing of the action scenes is really weird. On a number of occasions, time seems to just sort of skip forward several seconds in the fight for no real reason. It's like, you'll see a character throwing a punch at another, and in the next second, the second character is landing their punch on the first instead. Or a character will reach for their side, and then suddenly they already have a gun in their hand and they're already firing. It sounds nuts, but I swear it happens! There must have been at least half a dozen instances of this, probably more, and it's just baffling to me. If they were trying to go for some sort of unique style by cutting time out of the action scenes like that, it didn't work. It's disconcerting, unpleasant, and jarring every time it happens.
More assorted thoughts. As much fun as it was to see Taskmaster fighting by mimicking the Avengers' fighting styles, the character doesn't have enough screen time to really make their presence worthwhile. I would have saved them for another movie. I also suspect that the character's radically re-imagined origins and gender flip pissed off the usual chuds, so we'll see what the consequences of that will be in the coming weeks and months. The Wolverine tease was a great moment, and a perfect example of how to do that kind of teasing fanservice well (in stark contrast to, say, the Pietro fake-out in WandaVision). David Harbour carries most of the film's comedy on his back and does an admirable job of it, and Florence Pugh, whose character Marvel is clearly positioning as the "new" Black Widow, is a charismatic presence I'd love to see more of in the MCU. Let's hope it doesn't take another twenty movies before someone finally decides to let her have her own film.
In short, it's definitely one of the weaker MCU movies, but it's okay. A harmless way to spend two hours.