134 min | PG-13 | July 9, 2021 | Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Natasha Romanoff goes on the run and finally faces the program that made her. Old wounds reopen and a fake family reunites for one job. The Avengers already told you how her story ends, which is the whole problem.
Natasha Romanoff is a fugitive between Avengers films. She returns to the Red Room that trained her as a child assassin and confronts the man who runs it. The film is built as a spy thriller about a woman reckoning with the family she was assigned and the handlers who weaponized her. Underneath that, it is about institutional abuse and the women bred to be disposable. The story works best when it stays small and personal and weakest when it remembers it belongs to a franchise.
Scarlett Johansson plays Natasha with weary competence, but the film keeps handing the picture to Florence Pugh. Pugh plays Yelena Belova, Natasha’s surrogate sister, with sardonic timing and genuine grief buried under sarcasm. Her running joke about Natasha’s superhero landing pose deflates the self-seriousness around her. David Harbour plays Alexei Shostakov, the broken Soviet super-soldier, as a deluded blowhard chasing past glory. Rachel Weisz plays Melina Vostokoff with cold control, a scientist who chose the work over the children she pretended to raise.
Cate Shortland directs from a script by Eric Pearson and brings an indie sensibility that survives only intermittently. The early Budapest sequences favor handheld intimacy and let the actors breathe in cramped apartments. The score by Lorne Balfe pushes hard during chase scenes and crowds out the quieter character beats. The third act collapses into a falling fortress and weightless digital combat that erases the grounded texture the film spent an hour building. Antonia Dreykov as Taskmaster gets reduced to a masked plot device with no interior life.
This is a competent spy movie wrapped around a real idea it cannot fully serve. Shortland and Pugh locate something true about coerced women learning to choose for themselves. The franchise machinery keeps interrupting that story to deliver explosions and setup for the next installment. The film arrives years after the character’s most important moments, so the stakes feel borrowed. What remains is a sturdy middle of a movie with a strong center and a finale that belongs to someone else.