Review: Scarlett Johansson finally gets her Marvel closeup, but ‘Black Widow’ is too little, too late

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Florence Pugh nearly steals the Cate Shortland-directed movie — part origin story, part swan song and part Marvel-ized riff on 'The Americans.'

), zips us through the brutal education of the young Natasha Romanoff as she’s separated from the only family she’s ever known and transformed into a ruthless Russian spying/fighting/killing machine. Eventually, of course, after growing up to be played by Scarlett Johansson, Natasha will defect to the U.S.

All Natasha has are her killer instincts, her spectacular martial-arts moves and a billboard-ready arachnoid pose that comes in for some gently calculated mockery here. Cheeky, self-aware humor is by now an expected fixture of the Disney/Marvel brand, and as strenuous as it can be — look how serious these movies are about not taking themselves too seriously! — a little levity admittedly goes a long way in “Black Widow,” steeped as it is in elements of torture, mind control, murder and espionage.

When Natasha strolled onto the big screen 11 years ago, making a memorable first impression in the otherwise unmemorableshe turned heads with her beauty before unleashing a panoply of lethal moves. It was a familiar Hollywood bait-and-switch, objectification masked as empowerment. Johansson would later call out her character’s early, over-sexualized depictions, and in time those depictions improved.

Herself a recently deprogrammed Russian assassin who’s just as deadly as Natasha, Yelena is played by the superb English actress Florence Pugh — who, between this and her stellar recent turn as Amy in

 

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If BW was released any earlier ScarJo would've been melted by the TVA.

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