Why Did Everyone in Black Widow Do a Bad Russian Accent?
Black Widow. Image courtesy of Disney.
I would say the most interesting thing about Marvel’s pandemic-delayed Black Widow film, a solo effort for Scarlett Johansson that feels like the discharging of a contractual obligation, is that after it was finally released the star sued Disney because they didn’t give the film an exclusive theatrical run. Instead, it was released in theaters and on Disney+ simultaneously, which Johansson argued cut into her take a cut of the box office. Disney then clapped back, accusing her of being insensitive to the realities of a global pandemic. They eventually solved their problems out of court, and apparently may even work together again. But it was interesting, for a while, to see a studio and one of its major stars bickering in public over millions of dollars.
More interesting, I would say, than the film itself which updates us on what Black Widow was doing in the time between Civil War and Infinity Wars, in case anyone was wondering, which I doubt anyone was. It introduces us to a bunch of new characters, like David Harbour as Red Guardian, and Florence Pugh as Black Widow’s sister, kind of (?). It seems they are priming Pugh to take over as the next Black Widow, presumably at a much reduced salary.
I would say the main problem with Black Widow is that it actually moves too fast. It assumes the viewer has a deep familiarity with all things Marvel, such as who the hell Red Guardian is. It assumes that viewers remember details of Black Widow’s back story that might have been briefly mentioned a dozen films ago. And it spends a lot of time playing around with that backstory, when the best thing that ever happened to the character of Black Widow was that she started hanging out with the Avengers and she could leave that backstory behind. Well, this movie makes that backstory the whole story.
The plot opens in a bucolic 1990s Midwestern town called Ohio, or some such. A young Scarlett Johansson plays in the neighborhood with her little sister, and her mom Rachel Weisz. You know the mom is going to be important later, because they wouldn’t have hired an actress who cost that much money if she was only in the prelude. David Harbour is also, it turns out, their dad and they are not a happy American family - they are a deep cover Russian spy unit doing espionage and the dad also has super powers. In the comics, Red Guardian was developed to be a Soviet foil to Captain America - but because of the timeline the films have created, that wouldn’t work so they just leave this potentially very interesting character and his backstory dangling as the butt of a series of increasingly bad jokes.
Anyway, they flee from Ohio, and the family breaks up and the young girls are taken away to be trained in the art of assassinations. The film then jumps forward, and is basically about Scarlett Johansson getting her old fake spy family back together again in order to fight the evil boss-man who masterminded the whole program in the first place. We were told he was dead many films ago, but apparently that was wrong because they obviously weren’t thinking about a Black Widow solo film at that time.
Anyway, he has a secret floating lair in a cloud which seems like a great hide-out. Unless it’s sunny. He has the power of odor; no one can attack him as long as they can smell him. Also, at one point a woman uses mind control to make a pig stop breathing (but she doesn’t kill it because she is Rachel Weisz and we are supposed to like her, even though she is a genocidal murderer). I think I knew, as I was watching it, that it was ridiculous but I did not grasp the full extent until just now, as I wrote it down.
Not only that, but it then makes everyone - except Scarlett Johansson - speak in terrible fake Russian accents for the entire movie. I just knew there was something fishy about this movie when it became clear they were going to commit to that. When a film makes it all the way from conception, to script, to story-boarding to pre-production and shooting and at no point does anyone involved stop and say “Hey, guys, these accents are like SNL-skit level bad maybe we should ditch them?” then it really makes you wonder about how much thought they put into the rest of the movie.
Granted, some of the action looks pretty cool. But by and large, Black Widow feels unnecessary, rushed, poorly thought-out and thinly scripted. Who was clamoring for a Black Widow solo film anyway? I feel the same way about Hawkeye, incidentally, although some of the early reviews suggest they lean into the fact that he is a lame arrow-shooting joke member of the Avengers. That might have been one way to go with Black Widow. But they didn’t. And the result was, fittingly maybe, that Disney ended up getting sued over it.
