An Jo on BLACK WIDOW

Watched BLACK WIDOW in the cinema hall in XD box version. What hell of a difference the viewing experience it makes! With each and every bullet ricocheting and creating goosebumps up your arse, it was a thrilling ride. The last time I watched a movie in theater was in December 2020 and that too only for Nolan, for TENET. The superbly shot Bombay sky-scraper sequence, the initial opera attack, and the reverse entropy scene, those were the highlights for me in terms of cinematic experience.

The story is truly ordinary – frankly, which super-hero/mythical movie ever had an extra-ordinary story except ‘Mahabharata’ and then, ‘Ramayana’ in that order? But Scarlett fills up the screen with her glowing radiance. And make no mistake, she hides no effort to show that she is one of the hottest women on this earth; whether as Natasha Romanoff she’s just washing her face in the women’s restroom or she’s showing her scarred upper and lower-back. She pouts, she flaunts her dimples, but sends the adrenaline soaring high and she also has the intelligence to bring it down with her serious notes. [Watch her dramatize when she ‘severs the nerve.’] The camera deliberately focuses on her body but in a non-RGV-esqe vulgar manner. [And then I realize she’s executive-produced the film!] But, but, it is Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova that dazzles with her take: In a way, she’s Dharam’s Veeru to Amitabh’s Jai in ‘Sholay.’ She is great in action scenes – she’s so cool with a plan but no plan when she just force-reverses the wheel, opens her side of the door and knocks out the motorcyclist chasing them – but more so, fantastically comical: I would love to see her in a totally zany avatar one day! Her mocking of Natasha’s ‘style’ of landing on the ground and spreading her right leg and looking up is so hilarious, it almost threw me out of my seat laughing my lungs out! What timing! Ray Winstone as Dreykov plays a stereo-typical Russian General. Rachel Weisz as ‘Melina’ has either gotten old or made to look old. She does her job ‘professionally’ to put it mildly. David Harbor is hilarious as the faux-father to the ‘girls’ and it is superb seeing Yelena put him to brain-rest as she talks of women’s reproductive system. The one who does get a raw deal is Olga Kurylenko – of the infamous ‘Quantum of Solace’ Bond movie – as Dreykov’s daughter Antonia who suffers a collateral damage that Natasha never intended.

The film globe-trots across Morocco, Hungary, Norway, and the ‘Red Room.’ But what surprised me in the crediting of other locations when the end-credits roll were mentions like Australia and New Zealand. The action scene in Budapest is superbly shot and so is the scene in Norway. The initial confrontational/action scene between Natasha Romanoff and Antonia Dreykov on a bridge in Norway is superbly conceived and shot: And so is scene between Natasha and a bunch of ‘Black Widows’ where she single-handedly takes them on a la Tarantino’s ‘KILL BILL’ scene starring Lucy Liu’s O-Ren Ishii and her acolytes; though of-course, the scene here not as cartoonish or as violent as the one in ‘KILL BILL.’

This is not a very great movie. However, it is highly entertaining albeit with a bloated middle. But the ‘girls’, keep the movie thoroughly interested and the credit for that should evenly go to the director Cate Shortland and the screenplay by Eric Pearson.

The trio of Cate, Scarlett, and Florence kick patriarchy in super-hero movies/universe somewhere between a place called subtlety and in-your-face, if there ever was a place like that.