Black Widow
As anyone following my sporadic glimpses into the MCU will attest, my initial buzz about the Marvel Cinematic Universe started to fade after Avengers: Age of Ultron and while there have been some excellent additions to the franchise, the only two films that have arrived since Avengers: Endgame have been generally a bit meh.
We watched the 2nd MCU Spider-Man film again not so long ago and ... Hell's teeth, did they not bother to employ either a script or film editor for it? If the story was green lit by the Sony half of the partnership then Marvel are just prostitutes, if it came from the MCU then the franchise pretty much died with the post credit scene.
The other post-Endgame arrived last week on a multitude of platforms and other than being a bit meh, it's also a fun-filled action-packed film where we know the hero won't die and feels like some kind of contractual obligation movie carved out by Johansson's agent rather than the other way around. It added absolutely NOTHING to the canon, had some dodgy casting and probably could have been dissected, added to and made into six 30-minute episodes for Disney+, it was that... meh. The epic fight scenes were great - yawn - the rest didn't even really set up anything apart from pursuing, in the epilogue, a 'Suicide Squad' route, especially if James Gunn's reboot is as good as is expected, with The Dark Avengers...
JM Straczynski said the biggest hurdle with Babylon 5 was having the totally cosmic story in the middle; people expect things to get bigger and better not more insular and lots of people struggled with it after. The MCU will if it makes it less 'cosmic' and more 'domestic', but, then again, the MCU is going to struggle to not constantly repeat itself until it runs out of profitable films. Shang-Chi and The Eternals need to be special and neither looks it.
Black Widow is okay. It fills two hours nicely and there are a few nice touches. Ultimately, however, even after such a long wait it was always going to be an anti-climax.
