Black widow

One of the few upsides to the pandemic’s peak last year was that no Marvel films were released in theaters. We’ve suffered for it this year, with the arrival in close succession of Black Widow and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and, now, Eternals. But it was glorious to have a period of nearly two years without the deadening, soul-destroying presence of Kevin Feige’s Riefenstahlian masterplan deafening audiences in our multiplexes, and, increasingly, at home on our televisions. But the brief respite is over. Over the next eighteen months, no fewer than seven Marvel films will fight, bite, and kick their way onto our screens, in Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

C’mon, guys: you know how Natasha Romanoff feels about having red in her ledger. Marvel's long-awaited Black Widow movie finally arrived in theaters in July. But the excitement of the release has been sullied by bad blood — and bad debts. Scarlett Johansson, who gave 10 years of her life to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Avengers saga before getting a film of her own, sued Disney for breach of contract after they released Black Widow in the ‘Premier Access’ category on the Disney+ streaming service on the same day it hit theaters. According to Johansson and her reps, her Black Widow contract guaranteed an exclusive theatrical release.

On today's market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol... The list goes on: virtual sex as sex without sex, the art of expert administration as politics without politics, up to today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of 'Other' deprived of its disturbing Otherness. We should add to this series another key figure from our cultural space: a decaffeinated protester, a protester who says all the right things, but somehow deprives them of their critical edge.

Black Widow is the latest Marvel film and although I’d sworn off these films a while ago, due to sheer boredom, I was tempted back by the fact that this one stars a lady (Scarlett Johansson) and another lady (Florence Pugh) and even a third lady (Rachel Weisz) and is directed by a lady (Cate Shortland). Could be wonderful, I thought, except it isn’t. More women is its only decent idea. Otherwise, it’s business as usual. Otherwise, it’s all formulaic bish-bosh, smash-crash action scenes broken up by lame jokes and lame philosophising along the lines of: ‘Your pain only makes you stronger.’ Not if you’re dying in hospital and they’ve run out of morphine, I was minded to shout at the screen.