| Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures | Release Date: July 9, 2021 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
41
Mixed:
15
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews
Jun 29, 2021
As a reintroduction to the cinematic universe after a year off due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s definitely worth a look. Here’s hoping more Marvel flicks take inspiration from this one: shrink their scope, focus on the characters, and get the action right. And for God’s sakes, give us better third acts.
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The PlaylistJun 29, 2021
Black Widow is mostly an entertaining and adequate tribute to Natasha Romanoff, Black Widow, and Scarlett Johannson’s time in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Still, it’s not quite the bittersweet, moving, or resonant send-off one might have hoped for based on the initial movie’s promise of exploring a dark and damaged past and what that does to the soul.
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Jun 29, 2021
Black Widow does become typically Avengers at the end, with an overwrought, too-long action scene that plays like a festival of stunt doubles tossing each other around a Russian lab. The real ending is better: a post-credit sequence brings back Pugh as Yelena in a tease that is not terribly surprising but is extremely welcome.
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Jun 29, 2021
Black Widow is very much about the origin of Natasha — her skills and her identity. The movie features just enough kinetic combat to give a mainstream audience that getting-your-money’s-worth feeling, but right from the opening credits (built around a dreamy slow-mo cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”), most of it has a gritty, deliberate, zap-free tone that is strikingly — and intentionally — earthbound for a superhero fantasy.
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Jun 29, 2021
A few flaws keep Black Widow a rung or two below top-tier Marvel, including a sluggish final act, some generic villainy and yet another overlong runtime – seriously people, two hours is fine – but if you’re after a big, expertly-crafted, self-aware chunk of blockbuster entertainment to watch on the big screen, Marvel, as usual, has your back.
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RogerEbert.comJun 29, 2021
It’s ultimately a film that works on its own terms, a long-delayed enriching of the story of a beloved character that will make her ultimate sacrifice in “Avengers: Endgame” feel even more powerful in hindsight. Every blockbuster this Summer is being touted as the sign that the world is back to normal—“Black Widow” is more a reminder of what fans loved before it shifted off its axis.
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IndieWireJun 29, 2021
Like Jason Bourne, Natasha and Yelena were trained killers who defected, and the movie follows a similar kind of rapid-fire approach to the espionage genre as they pick up the pieces of their broken past and squabble through awkward family dynamics. The first MCU superhero movie to return to the blockbuster arena since the pandemic put the whole endeavor in jeopardy gets the job done; it’s also, by MCU standards, downright quaint.
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PolygonJun 29, 2021
While Black Widow’s director and writers try valiantly to make the film a fitting swan song for Natasha and an impressive action vehicle for Johansson, tying up the Avenger’s disparate character beats across seven other movies in an action movie that out-fights her male peers, it’s impossible to shake the feeling that it’s circling around a cul-de-sac.
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Jun 29, 2021
For all the work this spinoff puts into generating a traumatic origin story for its moonlighting superhero, it would be a stretch to say that either Johansson or the filmmakers finally find the real Romanoff—or even that they much deepen the various versions of her we’ve met already.
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Jul 7, 2021
Black Widow represents the MCU looking back when it should be moving forward. Everything about the movie seems small, even the big action set-pieces. No doubt fans – and when discussing Marvel, there are a huge number of those – will be delighted to see the mega-franchise returning to the big screen but it would be a fallacy to consider this anything but a low-tier entry.
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Jul 7, 2021
After a setup worthy of a John le Carre adaptation, the main storyline is an admittedly well-filmed and well-acted but disappointingly lightweight journey more akin to a lesser Bond movie (there’s more than one reference to “Moonraker” along the way), with a cartoonishly forgettable villain and far too much time devoted to domestic soap opera antics played for easy laughs and unconvincing sentimentality.
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Jul 1, 2021
Black Widow certainly suffers from MCU bloat—dutiful references to other installments in the franchise, an overly convoluted plot leading to a two-hour-plus runtime, an endlessly explosive action finale that takes place mostly in front of green screens—yet a strong cast and emphasis on character ultimately overcome much of those grievances.
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Jul 10, 2021
That it feels like it’s half at war with its title character, bringing her firmly to Earth (until she, like Bond in Moonraker, has to make her way to a high-altitude villain’s lair) and insisting on emotional coherence from her personal history, is its most interesting quality, though it’s maybe not as revolutionary as it first seems.
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The TelegraphJun 29, 2021
For the most part it’s as briskly enjoyable as the studio’s output tends to be, with likeable characters trading polished repartee while large computer-generated objects explode convincingly in the background. Yet perhaps for the first time, the briskness often doesn’t sit right with the material at hand.
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Screen RantJun 29, 2021
The biggest disappointment is perhaps that it doesn’t do enough to focus on Natasha, opting to set up Yelena as her successor. There is just enough Black Widow, however, to make this a distinct film, one that is less of a traditional superhero outing in the MCU, with the film more interested in exploring the lengths of human cruelty, perseverance, and the ties that bind despite everything.
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SlashfilmJun 29, 2021
Black Widow is at its best when it’s a wacky family drama between Natasha, Yelena, Alexei, and Melina, with dashes of a spy thriller. But Marvel films can’t content themselves with staying small, and Black Widow falls victim to the big bombast characteristic of the studio. The result is a disappointing solo movie that ends up burying Natasha Romanoff once again.
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Jun 29, 2021
In its final moments, Black Widow gives its heroine the humanity she never quite gained in her appearances in prior Marvel films, and it’s a shame that this slight but crucial wrinkle to the familiar morality of so many superhero stories ultimately feels more like a twist than a springboard for a new, more morally enlightened era of the MCU.
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