'Black Widow': Movie Review

In BLACK WIDOW (2021), Natasha of The Avengers must find the man who headed the Soviet brainwashing program that stripped away her world years ago and free the other women affected by the man’s evil trafficking ring. BLACK WIDOW is action packed, with lots of jeopardy and a strong moral worldview containing Christian, anti-communist elements, but the violence is a little too much.

The movie opens in the past when Natasha’s parents whisk her and her sister, Yelena, away from their home in Ohio. Soon, they are being cashed by the police and SWAT teams. They race into a plane and fly away to Communist Cuba. There, they are separated from each other. Natasha and Yelena, are in pain seeing their family taken from them. The place where they’re taken is called the Red Room. Along with many other girls, they are brainwashed and trained to kill for the Soviet Union.

Years later, Natasha has gotten away from her Soviet handlers and is living in the United States. She receives a message from her sister, in the form of some red vials and a picture from a photo booth of them as a child. She decides to try to find Yelena and heads to Budapest.

Natasha finds her sister in an apartment, and the two immediately start fist fighting. When they decide to stop, they realize they are both on the same page and want to find Dreykov, the man who headed the Soviet brainwashing program, and help the other woman, called black widows, who were taken into the Russian brainwashing program. It’s not an easy mission, but they do have the red vials, which when activated, stop the brainwashing and reveal the truth. They hope they have enough vials to save the women.

Yelena thinks the best path is to first find their “parents,” who they now know were Russian spies, to lead them to Dreykov.

BLACK WIDOW is an action-packed superhero movie with lots of spectacle. The movie starts out with a great introduction, showing communists brainwashing children and controlling them, but the plot is pretty basic for a movie spanning almost two and a half hours. There is hardly a stop in action, fighting, car chasing, and spectacle. Perhaps, if they had developed the characters a little more and the plot, then the movie would have been filled with more depth. That said, the movie does have many exciting scenes and lots of jeopardy.

BLACK WIDOW (2021) has a strong moral worldview that shows the harms of trafficking and governmental control. From the very beginning, the movie’s story shows the harm of these evils. In fact, the entire plot is based on trying to stop this villainy and allow people to have free will. One character, however, thinks she has to do an evil in order to stop evil, but this is rebuked, and she asks for forgiveness. The intense action violence in BLACK WIDOW does have some bloody moments that often lead to death, but there are only six obscenities and profanities. MOVIEGUIDE® advises strong caution for the amount and intensity of the violence.