I’ve been waiting for a Black Widow movie since Age of Ultron, and I can say I’m not disappointed at all! We finally dove into her background which I feel like the movies really failed to do so(Hawkeye suffers from this as well, I’m excited to see what they do with his TV Series). The side characters were great and enjoyable.
I do wish this movie came out a bit earlier. I’ve seen many people criticizing the movie about this, but IMO that’s more of a “meta” standpoint. Yes, we know that Black Widow dies, but that should not simplify her actions and motivations as a character. Take anything that came out with a prequel years after the original as an example. Also look at shows like The Clone Wars. We KNOW how it’s supposed to end. We KNOW that Palpatine will rise to power with the clones. When season 7 came around, people weren’t saying “why does it matter if we know all these characters are dead anyways.” They were excited to see the narrative get expanded upon... And Black Widow is no different in my eyes.
I think a major problem with Black Widow isn’t because she’s dead in the timeline, it’s because Marvel didn’t really give a damn about her character, thus neither did the fans... So much to the point where they just killed her off. Which is a shame because I would’ve love to see what else they can do with a classic character like Black Widow.
Overall I give this movie a 7.5/10. The Taskmaster reveal I guess fit the narrative of the movie, but they should have just used a different character. I’m hoping that somehow the true Taskmaster is out there somewhere. Maybe the Red Room secretly created other versions of Taskmaster? We’ll see, but IMO that was the low point for me in the movie.