Review: "Black Widow"

We’re in an interesting phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) right now, somewhat adrift -- but also open to fresh possibilities.

A decade of carefully interlocking movies culminated with “Avengers: Endgame,” with a number of pivotal characters definitively dying (not just “ashed” and then came back a la the Infinity Stones.) Now they’re turning up in Disney+ streaming shows like “WandaVision” and “Loki” and, with “Black Widow,” the first post-“Endgame” feature film.

(As you may recall, it was supposed to be released more than a year ago, so absent COVID it would have been out months before those shows.)

How does the movie get around the death of Natasha Romanoff, aka the former Russian superspy Black Widow? That’s easy enough: the story is set five years ago, in the in-between space after “Captain America: Civil War” and before “Infinity War,” when she was on the lam from her own government.

This film is essentially an origin story/reexamination of the character, with star Scarlett Johansson getting a chance to show more color and shadings for Natasha. We saw bits and pieces of them in the movies, but they had to be squeezed in between the big story pieces and male dominance of the MCU.

These are really the best parts of “Black Widow” -- learning about how Natasha morphed from abandoned kid to international heroine, dealing with lingering family schism (more on that in a minute) and exploring her journey from tragedy to redemption. This is a character who has outwardly expressed impervious confidence while hiding enough self-loathing to fill a Dostoevsky novel.

The action scenes are plentiful -- a little too much so, imho -- and can get repetitive, bordering on dull. Of course, we’re dealing with all normal, if exceptional, humans here with a paucity of super powers on display. There’s a self-conscious acknowledgement of this, with someone mentioning to Natasha that she previously enjoyed protection because people were afraid to come after her and risk retaliation from one of the “big Avengers.”

I’m not a big Avenger? she wryly challenges.

Australian director Cate Shortland (“Lore”) comes from an indie background, which probably explains why her character scenes are so compelling and the fighting stuff is a little jumbled. The screenplay by Eric Pearson, with story by Jac Schaeffer and Ned Benson, starts with Natasha as a disaffected preteen in 1995 living in Ohio as part of a family that’s just a spy op cover.

Rachel Weisz and David Harbour play their parents, and will turn up again in the more modern section. She was a brilliant scientist and he was the Red Guardian, a super-strong analogue to Captain America. Weisz does her woman-of-mystery thing to a T, and Harbour has fun playing a loud-mouthed blowhard always ready for fight, the guy who thinks he’s coaching the team when really he’s the mascot.

Florence Pugh is terrific as Yelena, Natasha’s long-lost kid sister, now an adept spy/badass herself. She harbors an ocean of resentment against her more famous sibling, and even coyly mocks the overplayed “superhero jump landing” thing (already dinged in the second “Deadpool”). She brings a jaded Gen Z cool to the table.

Of course, none of them are really related to each other, but they gradually come around to the idea that they’re the closest thing to a family any of them has.

The heavy is Ray Winstone as Dreykov, a Russian mastermind who has been building an army of all-female “Widows” assassins, for which Natasha set the mold. Back in her day they underwent psychological conditioning to break their will, but this new generation is chemically altered to obey. Olga Kurylenko turns up as an especially notable recruit.

I won’t argue that “Black Widow” is one of the best MCU movies. In fact, I’d put it toward the lower end of the pool with “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” It’s got a lot of elements that feel like retreads of earlier S.H.I.E.L.D. stuff, right up to a vertically enhanced headquarters called the Red Room.

But even if the blammo stuff is a little stale, Johansson gets a chance to flex thespian muscles in ways we hadn’t seen before for this character. Will there be another Black Widow movie, a la resurrection or more backstory stuff like this? We’ll see, but it was worth the wait for her to get a chance to shoulder her way past the boys to the front line.

Video review: "The November Man"

When he was a younger man, Pierce Brosnan played James Bond and was quite good at, to my mind. Now he’s around 60 and too old to play a run-of-the-mill spy, but of just the right vintage to segue into the burgeoning Geezer Spy genre --  now dominated by Liam Neeson (“Taken”) but also populated by the likes of Kevin Costner (“3 Days to Kill”) and Denzel Washington (“The Equalizer.”)

These movies all tend to resemble each other, to wit: our hero is an efficient, ruthless killer who has now retired from the game/faked his death, but is recruited/forced to take on One Last Job which, of course, goes horribly awry and thus he must wade through a veritable army of bad guys who mock him for his decrepitude, until he shows them what a supreme badass he still is.

The whole thing is an exercise in aging Baby Boomer fantasy, which doesn't necessarily mean the movie won't be very good, though that is in fact the case with "The November Man."

The plot is a nigh-incomprehensible mish-mash of gunfights, car chases and distressed damsels, with Brosnan as an ex-CIA man who finds himself facing off with some of his old crew, plus some new whippersnappers.

He's brought in to sneak out a high-level source, who is then assassinated in the middle of the operation. Soon he's laying waste to Russian mafia, various assorted goons and his own CIA handlers/turncoats.

The action scenes are crisp and engaging, but any time people start talking the movie slows to a crawl.

I'm not necessarily opposed to the ideas of geriatrics pulverizing their younger competition. Until they can come up with some fresher stories, though, best to leave the oldsters in retirement.

Extra features are pretty good, though you'll have to spring for the Blu-ray edition to get them -- the DVD version comes with zilch.

There's a making-of documentary, featurettes on shooting in Belgrade and Brosnan's comeback, plus a feature-length commentary with Brosnan, director Roger Donaldson and producer Beau ST. Clair.

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Review: "The November Man"

"You can be a human being or a killer of human beings, but not both. Sooner or later, one of those will extinguish the other."

So says Peter Devereaux, and he should know. After more than three decades as a top CIA operative, he left a trail of bodies so long it earned him his unofficial codename, from which the movie "The November Man" takes its title. That's because after he comes through a place, one of his grizzled old handlers relates, nothing is left alive.

That analogy doesn't really make any sense -- of course plenty of things are still alive after November; that's how we get spring -- but then neither does much of the rest of the movie. It's a frenetic mish-mash of shootouts and bombastic dialogue, with some damsels in distress and vague geopolitical outcomes in the balance.

Pierce Brosnan optioned the rights to the book series by Bill Granger right around the time he was given the boot as James Bond in 2005. It's too bad they didn't actually make this movie back then, because it would've seemed a lot fresher.

Stop me if this sounds familiar: a past-his-prime spy is forced into taking One Last Job, but things go bad and he is forced to wade through a quagmire of thugs and bosses of uncertain loyalties, all the while sternly lecturing the whippersnappers about what a badass he is, before providing them a demonstration.

Liam Neeson, Kevin Costner and other have already taken their stab at this premise, with varying degrees of success. (Up next: Denzel Washington with this fall's "The Equalizer.") Now it's Brosnan's turn, and while he makes for a nicely creased, convincing geezer spy, the story never becomes coherent enough to land any real emotional punches.

The setup is that someone has a very big secret about Arkady Federov (Lazar Ristovski), a Russian pol in line to take over the presidency. It seems he was a bad boy during the Chechnyan uprising, executing people and even taking a young girl named Mira as his personal sex slave. So Federov wants to take out anyone who knows anything about it, while the Americans (Will Patton and Bill Smitrovich are the senior spooks on the scene) want to leverage Mira against him.

Trouble is, no one can find her. So they settle for the next best thing, Alice Fournier (Olga Kurylenko), an advocate against sex trafficking who counseled Mira. Devereaux gets brought in to do a simple "exfil" -- that's "sneak somebody out" in spy talk -- of Federov's assistant, who has the goods on him. Alas, nasty things happen, setting off a chain reaction in which everybody is after Alice, and Devereaux becomes the only one she can trust.

There are a couple of X factors, both in the forms of younger, lean and hungry assassins. Alexa (Amila Terzimehić) works for Federov, has the body of a ballet dancer, the beak of a hawk and the stare of a killer. David Mason (Luke Bracey) is a CIA stooge who used to be Devereaux's protégé, until an op went bad and they became antagonists.

Much of the screenplay by Michael Finch and Karl Gajdusek -- too much, really -- is concerned with a chess match of wits between Devereaux and Mason, with the young guy better at rough-and-tumble skills while the older chap plays the superior long game. It's the old "teacher still has a few lessons to impart to the student" shtick.

But then the movie morphs into a relationship story between Devereaux and Alice, with her bearing a terrible secret (which I figured out around the 45-minute mark). Neither dynamic gets enough air to survive on its own, and both end up suffocating.

Director Roger Donaldson has made some terrific thrillers, including "No Way Out," which ratcheted up the tension inch by inch. But "The November Man" ends up as a lot of gunfights interspersed with confusing dialogue.

Or to put it another way: "You can have a revenge saga or a May/November romance, but not both."

Video review: "Oblivion"

I seem to have gone sideways from the consensus on a lot of films in 2013 – none more so than “Oblivion,” a science fiction epic starring Tom Cruise that was greeted  unenthusiastically by ticket-buyers and critics. For my money, it’s the most engaging and thought-provoking sci-fi movie since “The Matrix.”

Set in the dying days of the Earth, the story is about the last two people left on the planet. Jack (Cruise) and Vicca (Andrea Riseborough) live in a glass pinnacle in the skies, tasked with guarding the massive machines that are turning the world’s oceans into energy. The rest of humanity has already decamped into space for the long journey to a new home.

The machines are under continual attack by the alien “scavs” that brought about this calamity. Jack repairs the drones that protect the transformers, while Vicca coordinates with headquarters in orbit.

Things begin to happen that make Jack doubt the truth of what he knows. Both his and Vicca’s memories were wiped as part of their mission, and it soon becomes clear that the situation is very different than he comprehended.

I can’t tell you much more without spoiling the experience. But suffice it to say that “Oblivion” is an ambitious mix of existential pondering, action scenes and unexpected plot twists.

Forget what the herd says – rent or buy this one today.

Video features are quite good, headlined by a feature-length commentary track that includes both director Joseph Kosinski and Cruise. There are also deleted scenes, a comprehensive making-of documentary and an option to watch the entire film with an isolated musical score.

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Review: "Oblivion"

I wish I could tell you all about “Oblivion.” Actually, I’m dying to. But I can’t.

This new science fiction film starring Tom Cruise, directed by Joseph Kosinski and based on the unpublished graphic novel he co-created, is a slippery chimera of a movie. It misdirects and deludes us, making the audience think it’s about one thing when really it’s heading another way.

Much like “The Matrix,” it starts out as a seemingly straightforward sci-fi adventure and gradually deepens into something much more substantial. I will tell you that “Oblivion” is probably the most compelling film of its genre I’ve seen since “The Matrix.”

Revealing anything more than a smidgen of its nature would ruin the experience for you. Of course, being tight-lipped also makes it hard to write an effective review that gives enough of a taste to decide if you want to see it.

Cruise plays Jack Harper, an everyday man with an extraordinary job. He is a tech who services the drones that protect the Earth from alien attackers … or, at least, what’s left of it. The war, which came in 2017, split the moon asunder and ravaged the face of the planet. Mankind responded with its final option.

“We did what we had to. We used the nukes,” Jack intones. “We won the war, but lost the planet.”
Sixty years on, Jack and his partner, Vicca (Andrea Riseborough), are the only humans left on Earth. The rest have decamped to a moon of Saturn, leaving only the huge factories converting the oceans into the energy they’ll need to survive.

Jack and Vicca get their orders from Sally (Melissa Leo), commander of the space station orbiting above. Their own memories were willingly wiped to protect the mission, which after five years is coming to a close. Once they wrap things up, they’ll get transported to their new home.

The alien scavengers, or “scavs,” have other ideas. Enough still remain to cause trouble, damaging the drones that guard the energy stations. Every day, Jack sets out from their base in the clouds to repair the drones, while Vicca is the communications officer who keeps him in touch with the eye in the sky.

It doesn’t take long to figure out that things aren’t quite … right. Vicca and Jack are a team, a couple both in duty and in bed. We sense their sexual relationship is part of a plan designed to keep things stable and satisfied. That doesn’t stop Jack from having odd dreams about a stranger (Olga Kurylenko) in which they meet at the Empire State Building.

But that couldn’t be, since that was before the war – or even before Jack was born.

Sally is chipper but steely, insisting things be done just so. Vicca is with the program, but Jack has begun to have stray thoughts. Part of him thinks Earth is worth saving and shouldn’t be abandoned. He’s also piqued by what he finds on the blasted surface of the planet -- books and random junk that hold more meaning for him than they should.

Kosinski and his co-screenwriters, Michael Arndt and Karl Gajdusek, keep their storytelling cards very close to the vest, never revealing more than they should or a moment sooner than absolutely necessary.

For instance, it seems that part of Vicca’s job is exerting a certain level of control over Jack. He is allowed a measure of wandering and wondering, but when it begins to impede the mission, she uses her seductive powers to quiet his troubled mind. “Are you still an effective team?” Sally asks Vicca daily, and she’ll do anything to keep it so.

I noticed that Vicca’s eyes seem to be permanently dilated, which gives disquieting the suggestion of human-like doppelganger figures we’ve encountered in other movies, like Ash in “Alien.”

“Oblivion” doesn’t reinvent the science fiction wheel, freely borrowing themes and story elements we’ve seen elsewhere. But it synthesizes them in a wholly imaginative way that is both intellectually and emotionally engaging. This one falls into “don’t miss” territory.