'Black Widow': Scarlett Johansson Finally Gets Her Moment to Shine in the MCU

. It’s a strange movie: front-loaded with its best action, its zippiest writing, its canniest pleasures, then — as if the movie itself were a black widow, subjugated to the demands of some greater power — derailed by exposition that, rather than deepening what’s there, only serves to let the air out of the room for being so obvious. , that the mysterious program that made her did unimaginable things to her as a child — a forced hysterectomy being a case in point.

It’s not really a spoiler to say that at the heart of this story there is essentially, a child-trafficking operation — that feels implicit from what little bit we knew about the movie’s heroine up to this point, and it’s also something of a recognizable Soviet cliché. What it amounts to for the movie is a lot of playing both sides, emotionally. These Black Widows, as the assassins are called, are emotionless! Until they’re not. They’re ruthless! Until they’re not.

The movie signals its spy-flick bona fides with that global sweep familiar to the genre , a snowbound prison break, a bit of slip-sliding down the sloped roof of a building, a cutesy half-second of Natasha streaming a Bond movie. It’s all just signaling; none of it would hold as much interest if we hadn’t already seen it before, because the movie makes so little good on what it has.

Credit is due to Pugh and Johansson, most of all, for proving, in the movie’s opening chunk, that their foes-then-friends dynamic could satisfyingly hold an entire movie. Pugh is especially wonderful — when the movie allows her to be, when she gets to make fun of its pretenses, the hero-worship stuff that, at this point, is a bit stale. But, then, what’s also stale is the eagerness with which the franchise has learned to poke fun at itself.

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