Due to the pandemic, this marks the first MCU film that we failed to catch at the cinemas and we didn’t come back for the subsequent ones either. So this does kind of mark the passing of an era. No need to go into the kerfuffle between Scarlett Johansson and Disney about whether this properly deserved an exclusive cinematic release window, but it actually is a solid MCU film. It’s not exceptional by any means but it acquits itself well and I continue to be amazed by Marvel can get virtually unknown directors, in this case Cate Shortland, with no previous experience in making action movies to turn in respectable work.

After the events of Captain America: Civil War, Natasha Romanoff is on the run. While hiding in a safehouse in Norway, she receives a package but is unaware of their contents. It is only when she is attacked by a masked figure, Taskmaster, who is able to mimic her moves and those of some of her Avengers teammates, that she realizes the target is the package and the vials in it. She goes to Budapest where the vials came from and meets Yelena Belova. Decades ago, the two of them were fake sisters posing as the children of Russian undercover agents in the US. They were separated when their fake parents’ was blown and both girls were sent to the Red Room to be trained as agents. Romanoff believes that she killed Dreykov who ran the Red Room years ago as part of her defection to SHIELD but Belova states otherwise. He now employs mind control technology to control a vast network of widows and she herself was under such control until freed with the antidote contained in the vials. She had sent the vials to Romanoff hoping that the Avengers would take action against the Red Room. But with the Avengers divided, the two decide to take action themselves and naturally this calls for a reunion with their fake parents.

This is part superspy movie and part superhero movie, lampshaded by Romanoff actually watching a James Bond movie while laying low. It also introduces several new characters from her past to flesh out the character’s backstory and of course it needs to be worked into the MCU timeline as the character is dead in the present. It does all this remarkably well beginning with a fantastic opening sequence that both my wife and myself recognized as a scenario right out of The Americans. The fight choreography here is actually really good as are the requisite chase sequences. The relationship between Romanoff and Belova works well despite the rather pointless fight between the two when they first meet. I enjoyed how Belova challenged Romanoff about being too embroiled with Avengers business to come back for her. I do wish they developed the backstory for the Red Guardian a bit more and let him be more than just comic relief. I think they leaned into the female empowerment angle a little too much there, wanting to ensure that no male character upstages the accomplishments of the female ones.

The film tries too hard in other ways as well. Romanoff’s physical prowess is portrayed at a spectacular but still plausible level in the early parts of the film. Yet by the time they reach the Red Room. she is undeniably superhuman and can seemingly fall from any height with no fear of harm at all. This was probably done to make it appear that she is no way less capable than any of the male Avengers but it just breaks suspension of disbelief given what has been established about her character thus far. The film is similarly clumsy in having the characters run so often just ahead of explosions that it looks more like a joke than a impressive feat. The MCU films have the perennial problem that it’s hard to believably show how their non-superpowered characters survive bullets and here it’s downright ridiculous how so many low-level flunkies tote guns but simply to actually shoot with them. Morally, I also quibble with how quickly they forgive their mother figure Melina Vostokoff given her active involvement in the Red Room. The later scenes really sacrifice everything else in pursuit of unrelenting action.

That makes this merely a solid entry in the MCU line-up rather than an exceptional one. It does work very well in rounding out the character of Natasha Romanoff while introducing a bunch of new characters for Marvel to play with and it is a shame that it had to be released during the pandemic and so did less well than it deserved.