Category: Full-Fledged Film Reviews

Over the past decade and a half, Matt Reeves proved he isn’t exactly no stranger when it comes to meddling with original properties, or if not just that, one occasionally experimenting with genre such as in his feature-length directorial comeback Cloverfield (2008) where the redux-effect of Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005) and the extortionate glut of the found-footage era hits audiences familiarly, yet in that same space, differently from its intense reconstruction of their formulas. His (allegedly) bloody Let the Right One In (2008) American interpretation and Planet of the Apes “prequel sequels” (2014-2017) are undoubtedly where we do see that reboot-fueled perimeter of his craft though, and after the acclaimed success of those surprisingly weighty mo-cap chimp dramas in particular, it’s not too surprising to see him at the head of possibly the biggest superhero property yet. If anything can be verified of Reeves as of now, it’s that he’s one of the better Hollywood blockbuster directors working today, as what usually comes attached to someone with a crystal clear passion for intimate storytelling that ironically doesn’t abide entirely to its genre’s now outrageous necessities as seen in so much of what comes out from the market today. 

I had “recency bias” issues in 2019 regarding when I first saw Todd Phillip’s Joker and gave it a positive score, and have now, however, succumb to being polarized by its content. Suffice it to say, I get a little too hyped up for any sort of live-action Batman property, and I’ll fair-warn all reading as of now that there is a chance this “bias” may be masked as of reviewing, because I must confess: I liked The Batman. 

If Tim Burton’s Batmans were the epitome of the delusional fantasies one could extract from both Gotham’s absurd heroes and villains for which they miserably haunt over together, and if Nolan’s were to show the pushing point of no return for Gotham’s public mania through uncanny noir realism, then Matt Reeves’ are looking to be the b-rate versions of investigative David Fincher thrillers that are, however, set on the streets of a comparable noir and delusion-driven Gotham City, making them marginally more entertaining and rewarding of a watch than they would be otherwise in an environment less personal to us. Although, The Batman isn’t necessarily trying to break a lot of ground for the noir it takes from outside of the obvious that it’s now placed in the current superhero scene — if anything it’s trivializing the best of its capabilities minus its ambitions to at least attempt modern social / political climate parallels — but it is well put together enough to please people looking for elaboration to the live-action Batman mythos. If you ever want to test whether a mystery was truly spectacular or not, then the one-time watch shouldn’t feel like it was enough, and should therefore make you want to watch the movie again knowing the answers so that you can spot out all the neat clues, but Reeves and Peter Craig’s hints are pretty undemanding when glancing back from memory, and it doesn’t draw me personally with a dying need to see the film again anytime soon.

The action in The Batman may be set to a significantly lower pulse compared to your average superhero spectacle-fest, but there’s no question that when we do get action it’s usually great. The car chase sequence in particular is such a uniquely conceptualized use of minimal shot space and undoubtedly riveting if you can look past how insanely destructive it ends up being after suspending the disbelief that Bruce wouldn’t give a hoot about all those risk factors — although, one could tie that into his ego-driven ignorance as this obsessive early-stage Batman. Reeves also, as always, includes touching poetic moments to reconcile some humanity for the picture; one moving scene in particular made up for the third act climax it’s in, which was the flimsiest piece to this whole puzzle. Reeves knack really shines though from the tension he builds within The Riddler’s terroristic murders — that Kahoot live scene went harder than any moment from Spiral: The Book of Saw (2021), I can tell you that much.

As of now, Robert Pattinson is a compelling Bruce Wayne whether you like why that is or not; the entire movie has ambitions to prove that he isn’t wisely going about this caped crusader business by choosing one life over the other — The Bat to The Bruce. He’s still flopping (literally) a bit in this initial era of his vigilante career, and yet, this entirely new and refreshing addition to his life’s purpose seems to be something he’s bathing in with blissful ignorance like a game of lashing out more so than reinforcing it cautiously with also the power that his billionaire presence can have on the city of Gotham. You could even argue that this carelessness is what’s inspiring mayhem amongst Gotham’s spectators rather than mending them with the security they need.

What really ended up being my favorite element in the entire film though was the slow-burn of The Riddler’s intricate nature and the hike of learning that he is not as all-knowing as he sets out to be; we witness his own hypocrisies as he unconsciously gets parts of his banking “narrative” wrong; the tape-faced renegade seems representative of the radical clique from the poor of Gotham that assumes all immoral actions as only having one possible inception of equitable immorality, and in the ever-growing online cancel culture of today where people love to act *anonymously* as the morally authoritative and superior figures of society, it feels freakishly relevant — unlike Phillip’s Joker (set in the 80s…) which tries to accomplish something similar by having a man start killing people to simply say: “hey! That’ll happen cause of corruption: death!” and it’s essentially left at that degree of elaboration besides if you’ve seen The Batman already and know how DEAD similar that one reveal in the Riddler’s plan is to a plot point in Joker, and I must give Phillip’s credit for introducing it to the live-action outlet first howbeit. On the plus side, The Riddler’s interrogation scene in The Batman (as seen in the trailers) almost feels like a callback to The Dark Knight (2008) regarding the reason it comes up in the first place, and Paul Dano’s socially capricious presence and facial gestures alone are enough to make you as uncomfortable as you probably were in any given scene from Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019).

Zoe Kravitz’s Catwoman serves as the premeditated antagonist of the story, essentially channeling The Riddler before “The Riddler” vibes, but really that’s there to give Batman a mind to tussle with and save in his eyes as per their usual relationship amidst the Batman lore. It was charming to see Commissioner Gordon and Batman so hand in hand, giving us slivers of that The Nice Guys (2016) comedic yet genuine electricity to grant the film considerable levity. Oh yeah, and Colin Farrell as the Penguin? What a solid visual take on the character so far that isn’t just some prosthetic gimmick for clout; there’s undoubtedly potential for his brief interpretation to sprout triumphantly in the hopefully near future of this saga.

Evidently, almost everything here is what we’ve come to expect from a live-action adaptation whether it be found in Bruce’s revelations or look at capital corruption; it just has one moderately huge microscope hovering over it this time and a modern-day mindset to help warrant it. Like Joker, The Batman wants to show us examples of the outrageously privileged rich causing the poor to combat corruption via anti-villain mayhem, but this time through heavy narration and intricately established or momentarily hidden crime connections / social hierarchies that create a picture wide and clear for the audience unlike Phillip’s misguided ambiguity. Maybe once the Marvel Cinematic Universe juice runs out, it‘ll be time to expect some more noir appropriations that the still dominating superhero genre will take the form of from there on forward.

Verdict: B-

2022 Ranked, The Batman Ranked

“The Batman” will be released in theaters March 4th. 

Since even the earliest stages of cinema, “meta” has had the capacity to either drive referential storytelling into modernization as we know and love it or straight into the dirt to be mocked at for failing to persuasively speak on its flaws. Godard and The French New Wave reckoned the first option with either borderline or straightforward fourth-wall breaking of criticisms aimed at Hollywood cinema and the country’s power over them, but then American re-edits of Ishirō Honda’s King Kong vs. Godzilla made that very decade fancied for the second option by being on-the-nose to blanket statement magnitudes. Charlie Kaufman fulfilled the first option with his earlier films such as Being John Malkovich (1999) or Adaptation (2002) by incorporating real-life celebrity and moviemaking culture into poignant satire, but Adam McKay otherwise faulted under the second option literally just this year with his painfully unfunny, forced, and overt take on modern media socialization and political leadership cultures for which we all indulge in, a giant “no s**t” sprawled into two and a half hours of far-fetched allegories. Matrix Resurrections, the fourth entry in an originally closely released three-part franchise made so late and so coincidentally in a time of blockbuster nostalgia craze you can’t help but assume it’s only coming from a studio out for more money on their shelved property, however, is that rare self-aware piece of which falls under both options, but not completely by choice.

Lana Wachowski is likely the mind to congratulate for the unusual dodging of what could’ve been just a straight-reading retread. One of the director / writers of the original 1999 phenomena and its two follow-ups, who still continues to put in the effort of progressing sci-fi with her popular series Sense8 (2015-2018) and its related acclaimed specials, seems to have been suspiciously thrown back into the completed space of a trilogy that may have largely defined her career, but never seemed in need of continuing after the two sequels failed to please majority audiences nearly to the degree of its predecessor. A second shot at working on something that the sisters had, however, always seemed more proud of than their reactors almost seems artificially derived in a way, as if the demanding circle of going back to the beginning is only pushed to her work schedule in service of not having it butchered to deeper levels by not as universally beloved or marketable corporate authors that could never be as intimately close to this universe than its own creators. 

So in a sense, Resurrections feels like the inevitable being half-guided by the one who was pressured to dip back in, and the themes of the entire Matrix lore just so happen to fit perfectly into the nature of the real life entertainment spectrum being misguided by wealthy forces, deceitful lies that act to care, and reassuring idealisms that brought her there in the first place. What could’ve easily been a project made of pure hate from having to decide between two ultimatums (add something to it you can at least live with or let it burn and choose to never look back) is rather one birthed from rebellious liberation, and only partially to the worrying extent you may have where meta can become that obnoxiously in-your-face commentary that it has before. Lana’s initiation to steer the product shell rather uniquely becomes that rare positive, existing only because of the obsessively greedy machinery of studio remakes and sequels. In all irony though, her fresh take will surely ignite a mass of profit for the company it’s jabbing at, but lucratively that isn’t just who Resurrections has it out for: it’s looking at everybody in its audience, meaning all who have given into believing that they can acquire some of that psychological euphoria from remembering this otherworldly place from another time and refusing to seek out what hides behind the surface of their modern, recycled-leading reality by purchasing a ticket for a high and mighty organization or selling their time to its presence on an HBO Max home-screen. As you may have figured out, it seems honorable to the spirit that made the first Matrix such an iconic delight: that initiative to tell viewers to wake up and be more aware of your surroundings and how you choose to perceive them or let them control you.

The way Lana accomplishes this long anticipated miracle is by presenting none other than the polar opposite of the fans through our lead protagonist; no, not Neo, or at least that’s what he says; it’s Thomas once again. As you may have guessed, he’s in denial, taking blue pills on the daily, but fascinatingly in denial of the nostalgia that has paved his entertainment career as well as his depression of having it warned-out into surface-level pleasures, which is insightfully reflective of Lana herself. Memory becomes rather a curse and not a safe-space for constant validation; it can be like a drug-inducing hit of reformation of formula like it was in recently Jon Watt’s Spider-Man: No Way Home or it could be a discouraging cinematic slam in the eyes revelation as it was in about anything made post-80s by the self-referential king himself Wes Craven. The meta is in the fact that we are wanting this reformation to happen, and the commentary builds off this with the idea that this immaturity can go both directions: allowing yourself to be drawn to nostalgia can be compared as equals to neglecting the bodily desire of why we’re comfortable drawing to begin with, because they both require ignorance. One invites us to freeze by recalling while the other invites us to progress by forgetting, and yet they both seem to look past the fact that they have the high-chance vulnerability of resulting in deleterious repetition. The cool thing about Matrix Resurrections is that it submits to both, forcing the audience to suffer from the duality in this mirror reflection of our clashing desires when it comes to blockbuster entertainment. 

As the famous saying goes, to forget about war or any tragedy would be like asking for it to happen again. If we are to pretend that we are not capable of considering sin again, how are we to ever remember it as a sin? Doesn’t nostalgia of us combating it not remind us of the good that can cure? Well, yes and no. It can remind us of what good has been, but haunting over it can never tell us what else can be good too, and art in general has always submitted to this philosophical dilemma. Right now in Resurrections, it’s a firm allegory for the state of how we treat the modern franchise blockbusters we frequently see this century: we can either allow ourselves to hang onto the good we created from before, or find some method of learning what else is lurking there. We could also allow ourselves to forget the good we created to do this in the first place, but then risk just recreating the formula once more as a hindsight to the limitation of human creativity without the clear knowledge of history, just like Thomas finds himself doing when he has to venture into a familiarly structured Matrix-like mission again that he has, however, ambitiously and stubbornly made to be blocked out of his memory, blinding his ride’s guidance initially as if it was his very first hero’s journey rodeo, just as we are capable of doing to ourselves with the manner in which we choose to consume stories.

Where the fourth installment tilts to the other side of being that only somewhat successful “meta” piece is not only whenever it chooses to be on-the-nose to lackluster and even lazy extents, but in how it essentially drops the ball in its intentionally written abysmal second half that warps you through suffering for another allegory. The Matrix sequels have always not commercially worked from an absence of clean implication of enticing philosophical or social concepts into the actual construction of spectacle, and while Resurrection certainly does it better than the other two because almost every gimmick in it is there for a thematic reason, many of the gimmicks are purposely there to make the film unenjoyable. The first half of the movie is genuinely lighting in the bottle, starting off with new yet familiar characters looking through a literal peephole into a disorienting version of the the original Matrix’s opening with its unsettling action that will define the film from there on forward due to how it uses the same off-the-wall choreography we love from the original but rather shot like any generic shaky-cam spectacle to suck the life out of what was innovation, and editing so jumpy to put us into the disoriented and overwhelming nature of Thomas forcing himself to be okay with his reality. Nostalgia-bait is also not as disguised as it was in, again, something such as Spider-Man: No Way Home, and is instead fed as plainly as possible to you with untampered scenes of the original Matrix being cut into Resurrections to shame audiences from wanting such desperate reminiscence. It’s an overwhelming amount of information, but in the best possible way for a demanding experience.

Then comes the second half though, where the movie begins morphing into its true nature of being an uninspired direct sequel to Revolutions (2003) which Lana, however, seems to continue to assure us she’s not in complete control of. There are literally moments in this part of Resurrections where she uses the reveals of the main villain as a route to speak on how her studio is currently finding ways in this story to do any means necessary to have Neo and Trinity alive yet parted so that audiences can wallow in the slight hope of an idealistic continuation they wanted for something already left settled. In essence, the second half is basically 70 minutes of the conventional sequel that Lana can barely save by assuring audiences that she is against it, and will have to make the most out of it. Modern Hollywood-like conventions happen left and right with characters once again literally telling the audiences that they are indeed that. The off-putting and ugly action sequences come in and out more than ever before with characters also there to mention how uninspired this non-stop spectacle is compared to the predecessors that provoked more thought and conversation that Lana possibly thinks has progressively deteriorated in the modern age of the remake and obligatory sequel. Really, the wit began to fizzle here for me when it becomes that unavoidable epilogue to Revolutions, and all Lana can do is scream on the sidelines at us from time to time that this is just f**king stupid and pathetic of Warner Bros. to be doing, solely to grant audiences the tip of genericism. But hey! At least she can jeopardize their vision and critical success by doing so!

Conclusively, here’s the kicker: I will probably remember moments such as that great scene in the first half where Thomas and “Tiffany” have a cup of coffee together, discussing deja vu as a force of something you can’t remember that influences your perception of reality, and the social pressure of not challenging what it makes you want to believe and let go of; their bond then becomes the film’s likely metaphor for Lana’s real-life gender transitioning from there on forward, and the dominating pulse of 21st century media and industry reveals itself to be its antagonist segregating personal expression from mainstream cinema. But then that second half, for all its intent of purposely throwing us off and making us hate the movie to further exclaim this by almost immediately turning into the schlock we feared, ruined Resurrections for me successfully. Like some twisted yet slick pseudo-intellectual scheme, it showed me that sequels can be gripping if they provoke original and compelling statements, but can also be exhausting if they choose to overload conventional formulas of a reboot. And, yet, it is, like I said before, in spirit of what made the Wachowskis a force to be reckoned with when they released the original: by waking us up from our flimsy expectations of what a blockbuster should be. The Matrix has always been an allegory for numbing our minds from the truth, and in this fourth installment, it’s literally one of numbing our minds with studio rehashes and follow-ups. It forces itself to be intelligent by constantly calling out our inescapable desire for remaking passion that can and has to a degree become the passionless, and in this clusterstorm of sustained qualitative fluctuation it captures something unignorable. Personally, I hate it and love it for those reasons, but admirably, I think that was the point of the entire experience, and I can’t help but give at least Lana a thumbs up for being able to make some sort of distinct impact on us again, even if it’ll never be as massive or entertaining as the one that spread when the 1999 phenomena hit theaters.

As a final note, I’m mostly just happy with the fact that titling a sequel with “Resurrections”, which usually leads to a super garbage outturn in a franchise, has finally come to an end. Took decades, but Hollywood alas did it. 

Verdict: C+

2021 Ranked

“The Matrix Resurrection” is now playing in theaters and available to stream on HBO Max.

“Desert power” is my new “Ocean Master” now. 

It may be long from now before we ever see a movie as menacing in its size and presence as Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. The coined saying “you won’t believe it until you see it” gets thrown around a lot in the culture of film criticism, but never has it met its definition when referring to a visual “epic” as much as it has here, maybe since Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) trilogy. The sound alone of Dune is assertive and penetrative enough to make it feel like you’re experiencing some form of celestial ascension. Villeneuve bounds the screen with an uncanny amount of noise to make his film seem like no other, and it works. There is a meditative intensity and even a surreal, dream-like hesitancy too with how he directs and edits many of the introductions to the world’s inventive visual structures, customs, and creatures. On top of that, from the shield fighting to every little VFX strand of hair-like features on those giant worms, the special effects are as close to perfect as cinematic sci-fi has come. The experience is truly worth every penny to see such optically and audibly coercing extravaganzas on the big screen.

And yet, despite such appraisal of these technical miracles… akin to Villeneuve’s last outing Blade Runner 2049 (2017), he finds himself stumbling regardless. His plots usually aren’t as clever as the thematic ideas he wants to coalesce in them, with Dune representing however those torn directly from the movie’s source material. Giant event by giant event almost happens immediately after the fact despite this movie wanting to seem like a lived-in reality, one with the potential to connect us more to a thrilling purpose in its creation. 

To whether its blame is upon great Frank Herbert himself — have not read the book, sorry — or our adapter, the surrounding characters aren’t as sophisticated as their reason to the plot is, similar to once again 2049’s. Even Paul, the heart of the story, is barely interesting in his “chosen one” by the numbers conflict, saved thankfully enough nonetheless by the ambiguity he faces of knowing what exactly his destiny of being the artificial Christ really entails. Villeneuve will often use curious, unexplained yet intense lore, within the vein of the kooky randomness or fictional culture shocks you’d find in something like the original Star Wars (1977), to the point however where we’re enlightened to go back and see them again, regazing at these expositional attempts to lure us into a world centuries into further alienation from the humanity we know of that although… also wants to parallel ours. It’s a difficult task to pull off, this combination of worlds, and even more so if we are to rely on siding with or at least investing ourselves into these foreign people of Atreides; why should we care to view their fight aside from just obliviously basking in the explosive violence that encompasses it? The film almost certainly wants us to relate to their struggle, but it doesn’t necessarily put in the effort to make an excellent job of it.

Paul’s father Leto mentions a few times in the movie that their house is in favor of having peace with the inhabitants that they have claimed land from, something vital that could’ve been the very kinetic presence to get us emotionally wrapped up in these colonists’ journey, yet it seems wrongly underdeveloped in the nature of this movie. Villeneuve even makes Herbert’s famous “fear is the mind killer” appear more like a cameo here than a matured theme, and it doesn’t help the movie feel any less like just some long checklist of thematic introductions. It’s as if Villeneuve has stripped and mitigated messages and the characters’ intentions out more than ever for fast plot sequencing, which is such devastating judgement on his end in consideration of possibly having these specular visuals he’s created accompany something truly poignant and gripping that could match its own massively physical magnitude, therefore making Dune the bigger-than-us epic it yearns to be. Where there is a story of colonialism, religious manipulation, and organized duplicity happening right in front of us, it can occasionally be a shame to see Villeneuve abstaining any expansion to their composition, as if he’s holding off on his very provocative movie only for the second part; something though that is not yet a guarantee to eulogize this opening chapter.

That may be why I see this as my least favorite film Villeneuve has done so far, because his character interpretations of Herbert’s didn’t stick with me as much as any of his rather original designs did. His chi for captivating a foreign universe is in tip-top shape like never before and truly unparalleled to no other modern auteur, but it’s just not enough to make Dune a great movie when you cannot also captivate the people who embody that scope so long as the story begs of you too with its parallels to a relatively non-foreign political universe. Who knows though? Maybe part two will help enhance this adapted cinematic opener for one of sci-fi’s most renowned novels. But for now, the biggest drawback of Dune: Part One is that it’s just barely standing on its own two feet. 

Verdict: B-

2021 Ranked, Denis Villeneuve Ranked

“Dune” is now playing in theaters and available to stream on HBO Max.

WARNING: Black Widow Spoilers Ahead

2021 really is the year where Marvel can’t find a way out of writing their most embarrassing finales yet to eerily compliment fairly promising first and second acts. 

Before I dive into what may become my longest MCU-related review yet, I wanted to talk about something I initially admired about Black Widow that unfortunately became something which only made me even more riled up by it: the opening. Essentially, we are introduced to a flashback sequence where we observe a supposedly regular family that Natasha (aka Black Widow) had before meeting The Avengers, but it’s disclosed that they are in some sort of danger. They seem quite put together relationship-wise, but there is no doubt that they are on the run from an unusual threat. This entire sequence misleads the audience beautifully into assuming the obvious of something that would be established as your typical glimpse into a superhero origin story: they’re being chased by some sort of evil and the parents are trying to protect their children. If you have seen Black Widow, obviously you know that that isn’t exactly the case. We learn that not only are the parents just decoys used to emulate the common socialization of familyhood for the children, but that they were there using these kids as experimental pieces that would hopefully build them into becoming A-1 assassins. The family was being chased because, well, the parents were legitimately holding children hostage. The parents are debatably psychopaths! The best scene in this movie shows us how the ex-father figure Red Guardian and the younger ex-daughter Yelana confront each other about this; it ends up being a dispiritingly simple-answerable yet rightfully bonafide discussion. To this extent, that is about the farthest compliment I can give Black Widow, but either way, these pros are ultimately tarnished by how the movie decides to further add to them in notably its finale. 

Scarlett Johansson has been a part of this franchise since 2010, and her character has also been demanded repeatedly to have her own solo spot in the light for years now, and despite us now finally getting there given this new movie that has come out about her, all I can say is “Natasha, you f**king deserved way better!” The fact that your movie has been delayed and delayed for a decade now is already considerable proof that Disney never gave a damn about any sort of “just” female representation until the concept of it became mainstream and thereon profitable, so I don’t think any of us should be surprised that your time to shine came into fruition so late. Anyhow, I’m sorry to say but, Black Widow may just be the worst MCU movie ever written, at least to me.

Look I would’ve been completely fine if this entire movie was just some awkward family reunion or if it stuck with its spy espionage, Matrix-like hyper-trained combat choreography — reminiscent of The Winter Soldier and even the Jason Bourne films — instead of it being periodically abandoned for (weakly edited) cheap and clean protagonist victories followed by disproportionately cartoonish action sequences. At first this movie smartly doesn’t seem like it’s about heroes but victims fending off for themselves from the dangers of the company that created them, yet almost always with these newer MCU movies does there have to be some out of place “bigger scheme” to their conquest that’ll ultimately sacrifice their level-headed developments for idealistic (i.e. unrealistic) improvements in themselves. I don’t think this universe has ever had a movie this try-hard thus far, and I will go into more detail about that of course later in this review. It’s just mind-boggling to recognize how powerful an ending can be, with such a savage ability to leave me with a purely sour taste in my mouth for something that I actually had fun with for some of its runtime. Conclusions are collateral when they eradicate every good idea they set up with spoon-feed pay-offs!

Instead of just making a movie about those opening credits where we can truly deep-dive into the manipulative transformation of underaged soldiers into cold-blooded killers or even the industrial corruptions of inflated secrecies in organization, the film just decides to show pity remorse for the concept of child slavery once the victims have become adults… The movie ends up presenting a cheesy resolution where decades of a misogynistic man’s oppression can be instantly taken down, and that leads me to another major complaint I have with Black Widow: it dares to include an allegory for sex trafficking, which is quite possibly the most notorious and disturbingly impenetrable worldwide crime a human can commit and the movie plays it off like it’s some quick-solve disruptance. I know most people will probably not look this far into what the blockbuster is trying to explore with this underlying implication, but to me the fact that a large amount of people will watch these Marvel movies and subconsciously infer and take into account this loose information about a very real atrocity is unfortunate. This film is undoubtedly trying to impact people with discussion about parallels to our own world, cause trust me, something as bold as sex-trafficking wouldn’t be implied in a film if it weren’t trying to make a statement.

I don’t think it’s healthy to always be consuming media that glorifies the idea that all it takes is a superhero to instantly fix a very real-life situation such as sex-trafficking; it’s a manipulatively utopian belief to teach children that all that has to happen for something to be fixed is to let someone who has more power than you do the work for you as if the cruel scheme of life is that easy to patch up or, better yet, that you yourself have the power to instantly fix an issue as if it would take no effort to complete it and not a long journey of planning and built-up collaboration to get there. I do believe though that most people are thankfully able to suspend their disbelief, so I’m sure most aren’t thinking or taking the hilariously surface-level Harvey Weinstein-esc plotline seriously, but I’m just personally annoyed by the fact that Marvel even attempted to integrate something as serious, touchy, and complex as sex-trafficking into such a goofball of a story. I mean, speaking of Weinstein who is clearly being mirrored in this movie with the main villain, just look at his situation for example; it took decades for that man to actually be sent to prison after all the sex crimes he committed and a long line of accusations that had to be piled up for it to finally be taken seriously, some of those accusations coming from people who were spilling the tea on him for also decades. Nonetheless, I guess this will probably only come off as a problem to you if it collides with your own moral beliefs, but since it collided with mine, obviously it made me think lesser of the film and of course its messages.

I think Black Widow got unlucky being so far ahead in the MCU’s canon, because it almost feels like another add on to our fatigue for the ever-increasing fantasy-driven bulls**t that has made the superhero experience progressively worse than maybe it would’ve been if it had came out earlier in the franchise when logic wasn’t at least completely abandoned. Anyways, sticking to the topic of the idealism envelope we find stirring in the MCU today, let’s talk about another prominent villain in Black Widow called Taskmaster: turns out, she’s just here to be a plot device so we can have an absolutely pathetic redemption arc for Natasha. This again is another Marvel superhero moment where a character makes a fatal mistake (Natasha *allegedly* killed a child) and doesn’t end up suffering the full consequences of it because it was actually a (difficult to believe) hoax all along. Wow, these heroes really are invincible! 

The psychopathic parents that I mentioned before who were really well set up in that opening due to them being coated in deception like a real smuggler suddenly decide they want to do the right thing out of… I don’t know… God’s will? Maybe though this doesn’t completely apply to David Harbour’s character, but Rachel Weisz’s character (the ex-mother figure) is so horribly underdeveloped that the film thought it would be okay for her to suddenly want to take down an organization she’s helped out for decades, one for which she furthermore also knew the Leader’s weakness — so if she really despised this leader, why did she not try to take him down beforehand — yet all it took was being called a “coward” for her to finally commit to it. Also, the main villain Dreykov was able to keep all these women enslaved for decades yet makes a series of some of the dumbest decisions you could possibly make in the finale at the convenience of allowing the good guys to succeed by cornering ALL of his slaves into one room with the heroes who he knows could have an antidote for their mind-control… Umm… I don’t even want to talk about the sacrifice that Yolanda makes because I’m sure for those who watched it, you already know how out of place it felt practically, phasing as another random way to spark an emotional reaction from the audience. Plus, don’t even get me started on how the climax was sequenced so that they could implement some twists and turns into the mix; it’s embarrassingly structured and more importantly convoluted logistically.

To me like I said before, this may just be the worst MCU movie not because it’s the least competently directed or acted one — since it really isn’t! — but because it tries to do SO MUCH thematically but only wants to take last-minute shortcuts to get there. Full redemptions (necessary or out of place) and major personality changes (needed or not) are all amalgamated at the span of minutes in just one ridiculously over-produced finale, frying my brain to dumbfounded shock as I left the theater. When it comes to a case such as Black Widow, I think I’ve officially learned that me being suddenly disappointed as a film goes along just hurts more than say being consistently bored which most of the bottom-tier MCU fare committed before 2021. Natasha is one of the least interesting characters in her own movie; her arcs only makes her seem as unbelievably over-the-top (even for MCU standards) as the new-founded trivialized action sequences. She’s a character now that feels inaccessibly invincible for the audience. It’s already difficult to connect with people who can’t be physically harmed in action spectacles, but when a movie ironically then thinks it’s okay to bring “psychological” harm into the mix with something as ridiculous as Natasha killing a little girl and then that little girl happening to be alive from a colossal explosion all along just so Natasha can reassure how perfect she is by saving this girl as an adult, you’ve basically lost most of my respect for your lead that you want us to emphasize with. I don’t know, why not just have her face the consequences so she can be inspired to become a better person? Why go through all these extra loopholes? Doesn’t it seem so simple or am I just losing my mind???

Bless, Florence Pugh though; her performances have never stumbled even in movies as bad as this. As a sibling, I also related to how they wrote her banter because a lot of it seemed “weak” but on purpose in a “this is coming off the top of my head, and I’m not really trying to offend you; I’m just teasing you because you’re my sibling” sort of routine that many of us can familiarize with. Trust me, I would be giving this film the lowest score possible if her, David Harbour, or that opening weren’t as emotionally convincing or as entertaining personality-wise.

Everybody’s accents here may have gone a little too far, nonetheless. Yikes!

Verdict: D+

2021 Ranked, The Marvel Cinematic Universe Ranked

“Black Widow” is now playing in theaters and available to purchase on Disney+.