The second to last of the original Avengers to get her own standalone bow (with Hawkeye’s very own miniseries hitting Disney+ late 2021), Black Widow has been long overdue her turn in the spotlight for some time now. If we weren’t living in an aggressively patriarchal society, it might seem strange that it took so long to get Scarlett Johansson, who has led the charts for most bankable actress alive for many years, her own feature film. But then again it seems that Hollywood suits only recently learned the lesson that the masses would turn out for superhero movies that starred people other than white men and so thus Black Widow was bankrolled into existence, 11 years after her debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

To only turn the mic over to Johansson after her character suffered the kiss of death in Avengers: Endgame (2019) is an equally strange calculation and an obvious bit of whoopsie retconning – this film takes place between Civil War (2016) and Infinity War (2018) – but with an entry as largely mindlessly enjoyable as Black Widow – if still as artistically blasé as the rest – it’s hard to complain too much about the lack of chronological sense. At least with the top half of the film. Working off a story from WandaVision creator Jac Schaeffer and written by Thor: Ragnarok penner Eric Pearson, director Cate Shortland (Lore) makes a seamless transition from the arthouse to the multiplex, delivering an entry that colors within the lines of Kevin Beige’s rigidly-manicured visual and thematic boundaries while offering a more ground-level portrait of a shero suffering the skeletons in her closet.

Black Widow begins with Natasha Romanoff on the lamb. Fleeing from General Ross (William Hurt) and his steely commitment to incarcerate any and all that defied the Sokovia Accords, Natasha lands in Norway, living off the grid in a far-flung trailer, watching old Roger Moore Bond movies and eating brownish slop from a tin can. Though I would have happily watched a movie about Natasha finding herself amongst the solitude of the Norwegian mountains, her past comes knocking when her long-lost “sister” Yelena (Florence Pugh) mails her a MacGuffin in the form of some red vials of gas.

The only way forward turns out to be her past and the lone wolf Avenger is reunited her estranged “family” (really nothing more than a faux-nuclear unit of Russian sleeper cell agents, long since separated) including “father” Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour) and “mother” Melina Vostokoff (Rachel Weisz). Tenuously allied and ready to avenge, Natasha finds herself on a mission to take down the power-hungry operator of the Black Widow program who she long believed to be dead, Dreykov (Ray Winstone).

The fact that Johansson is outflanked by a supporting cast that is more than up for the job can be difficult to ignore, with Harbour and Pugh regularly stealing scenes right out from under the MCU veteran. But then again Natasha Romanoff has always been a bit of a difficult character to foster attachment to. Her lack of any proper standalone story to date and frequent narrative sidelining made her a bit of a shadow figure; an ass-kicking minx always running from something and so never clearly in full view. Black Widow attempts to right those wrong by putting the character and her demons into clear-eyed focus, but it still ultimately feels like a case of too little, too late.

The character’s utility has morphed throughout her 11 years spent in the Marvel Universe, metastasizing from what Johansson herself described as a “piece of ass” in her introduction in Iron Man 2 into a forlorn but still-rather opaque loner with an inescapable past. Unlike so many of her male compatriots, Natasha rarely turned to glib humor and sardonic posturing. Her signature was a bit more opaque, defined by the spinner-girl-power physicality of her combat style and the tokenism of being the only lady in the gang.

Throughout her tenure with the Avengers, Natasha remained grounded and mission-focused while the boys went out and had fun. By Endgame, Natasha had turned into the super-group’s ad-hoc matriarch, finally discovering a sense of peace and place before ultimately becoming a tragic heroine through the act of self-sacrifice that brought her existence in this continuity to a screening halt. Or so we must assume until that multiverse portal is cracked opened.

Black Widow attempts to posthumously resolve Natasha’s multiple loose end to varying effect. In what is likely most distinct segment of the film, Shortland revisits Natasha’s short-lived memories as a child in Ohio, cut short by her fake-family’s exposure and forced to flee. It’s no accident that the most thrilling sequence of Black Widow is also the least busy, as a young Natasha and her assigned mom, dad, and kid sister evade capture by the hands of American SHIELD agents.

Shortland films these moments with an eye for tragedy, the lucid turning point where shattered dreams turn to harsh realities. Children stripped of scrapping their hands and knees playing outside and instead forced to kill. Natasha’s story had always been one of a promising young woman bent into the mold of a Russian superspy and Black Widow gives that tale context and detail, providing sufficient backstory to make her a more full-formed character if still never really defining why this chapter needed to exist beyond the obvious merits of box office dollars.

As the bombast and stakes are ratcheted up, Black Widow becomes, as so often happens during the third act of these movies, less involving. The material set around an awkward family dinner table or during a prison armwrestling match offers more intrigue and humor than any of the mandatory set pieces, none of which are particularly memorable after curtains close. But when Shortland leans into the street-level espionage, with foot chases and hand-to-hand combat that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Bourne movie, we get a glimpse of the movie that Black Widow might have been if it weren’t desperate to gross a billion dollars worldwide.

Instead we get the usual visual diarrhea of a bloated CGI budget splashed in every nook and cranny come the final stretch of Black Widow. It’s big. It’s noisy. It’s Marvel. Though the rest of the movie works as a fitting farewell to a not-quite-beloved character but a well-worn one, Black Widow ends on a disappointingly frantic low note, leaving this viewer wishing that maybe Black Widow had been just left to find herself on that Norwegian mountain after all.

CONCLUSION: If you can ignore the fact that admittedly minor-note ‘Black Widow’ fits oh-so-awkwardly into the Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline, you’ll find one of the franchise’s more entertaining solo entries. At least for most of the movie. Florence Pugh and David Harbour are fantastic additions to the MCU even if they outshine titular star and franchise mainstay Scarlett Johansson as she (presumably) exits the frame for the last time.