Having been delayed due to the pandemic, Black Widow brings us back into the cinematic fold after the current exploits on Disney + in the spin-off TV shows. We dive straight in with an explosive opening where a young Natasha Romanoff and her surrogate suburban family (who are Russian spies) are chased by SHIELD operatives before escaping to Cuba on a plane.

But after this fantastic and thrilling opening, things take a turn for the worse with Ray Winstone’s arrival as the undercover family’s boss. He reminds us that is pure comic-fare as he delivers the broadest and most stereotypical Russian gangster since Kenneth Branagh in Tenet. Or his co-star Cate Blanchett in Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull now I think about it.

So Natasha and her sister Yelena are whisked away for mind control assassin training in a Soviet ‘Red Room’ before she defects and reunites back with her sister (now Florence Pugh) during her on-the-run period after Civil War’s Avengers’ split.

The film is fast paced but leaves little breathing room at the start and with black tactical suits, rural hideaways and a dark family history, there’s a dash of Batman Begins. No bad thing. A city-wide vehicle chase is a crash bang wallop of an action sequence and Pugh and Johansson are great in their sisterly roles but are often restricted by the Marvel formula from going anywhere other than predicted.

The sisters head to a prison to break out their father (David Harbour as Alexei Shostakov who as Red Guardian is the Russian super-soldier counterpart to Captain America) and the proto-family reunite with the return of Rachel Weisz as their ‘mother’ Melina Vostokoff (also a Black Widow in her past) and all the members’ old secrets are divulged.

Interestingly, the score of the film is of note with its Russian chanting and Dark Knight-y ominous soundscapes. There’s also a hint of thrilling Bourne-esque staccato strings to intensify the fugitive on the run set-up. Sadly, the other similarity with Bourne is some shocking editing at times.

The second Bourne film (and Taken 2’s chaotic editing) have been broken down many times before, and unfortunately Black Widow uses multiple cuts/angles of someone simply walking into a building to set up a scene which seems just silly to me. This mad editing is often for no real reason and is a distracting flaw when the movie frankly doesn’t need it.

And as we enter the film’s second act, the pace slows, a hysterectomy joke seems badly misjudged (and tonally strange) and as their rotund dad tries to fit into his old costume, this middle section sags like his own man boobs.

As she tackles the dull hench-woman Taskmaster, the generic plot continues as expected as Natasha and family try to destroy the Red Room programme and free the women it has enslaved into a life of killing against their will. And the fact that smelling Ray WInstone stops you being able to give him a dry slap is the strangest thing in the MCU to date.

So with Wonder Woman beating her to the line for a solo franchise film, is Black Widow worth this overly long wait? Sadly, not massively despite many things to like. It’s mostly inconsequential given it’s a prequel, yet may have worked in its real time-line, surely after Guardians 2 & before Ragnarok as an antidote to their cosmic offerings.

The action scenes are a highlight though, the end free-fall sequence was far better than the trailer hinted at, and Florence Pugh and Scarlett Johanssen are ever-watchable here as they are in most things they tackle. I know the film couldn’t be Red Sparrow (the rather excellent but certainly adult 2018 drama where Jennifer Lawrence joins a Russian school of assassins) but something more substantial seemed missing from the whole shebang.

It feels all too-little too-late as an entry in the Marvel franchise and will sit neatly in the “not bad” section of their filmic behemoth universe being neither a covert operative catastrophe or super spy success.

★★★