This weekend my sweetie-wife and I did something we haven’t done since February of 2020; we went out for Sunday lunch and a movie.

Lunch was open air dining at a seafood place and the movie was the COVID delayed MCU franchise film Black Widow.

Natasha Romanov, AKA The Black Widow, was introduced into the MCU with Iron Man 2 as an agent of SHIELD with her background as a former assassin revealed in marvel’s The Avenger and throughout the twenty plus run of the MCU movies though always displaying strong fan support she remained the only Avenger character without their own stand-alone entry in the series. Now, following the conclusion of star Scarlett Johansson’s run as the character, Marvel Studios has backfilled a film for Natasha with Black Widow.

The film is principally set following the events of Captain America: Civil War which presented the dissolution of the Avengers due to political and personal conflicts between its members.

A fugitive because of her refusal to abide my new international law regarding ‘enhanced’ individuals, Natasha’s plan to lay low and off the grid watching bad Bond movies is shattered when her past as an assassin reemerges and the deadly, abusive, and corrupt organization that created her and a cadre of women with similar skills is revealed to be quite operational. Forced to reunite with fellow undercover operatives from her past Natasha arc confronts her with not only with challenges to global peace and freedom but with her self-image and understanding of exactly who and what she is.

Black Widow is a solid entry into the MCU canon that personally does not score high enough to place it within the top quarter of entries but rather just below that. The story is solid, the acting credible, and the action fast paced and well shot never leaving the viewer confused as to who just did what, a result all too often these days of frenetic editing in other action movies. Setting the story between Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War limited the film’s ability to breath and carve out its own space and it would have been far better for this to have been produced and shot in sequence instead of feeling like an afterthought apology to the character’s fans. Though the movie’s post credit sequence could only have been created and shot following the events of Avengers: Endgame.

Still, this was a fun film and well worth the time to get out and see it in a theater.