Main Menu

Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 08:18:56 PM

Login with username, password and session length

Black Widow

Started by touchingcloth, July 08, 2021, 11:10:27 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

touchingcloth

Say what you like about the film, it definitely had on-the-nose girl power.

Lord Mandrake

Didn't get past the execrable dirge cover of Smells like teen spirit. Still seething that any cunt would have that much nerve.

Avril Lavigne

Quote from: Lord Mandrake on October 18, 2021, 08:54:54 PM
Didn't get past the execrable dirge cover of Smells like teen spirit. Still seething that any cunt would have that much nerve.

That was the worst part of it for me, I persevered and enjoyed most of what came after but that intro nearly made me quit the whole thing and I don't even have any particular reverence for Nirvana.

touchingcloth

Quote from: Lord Mandrake on October 18, 2021, 08:54:54 PM
Didn't get past the execrable dirge cover of Smells like teen spirit. Still seething that any cunt would have that much nerve.

John Lewis are using Territorial Pissings for this year's Xmas ad.

checkoutgirl

Are black widows superhuman? Because Pugh gets blasted about 20 feet in the air by a huge explosion and she's grand. Scarlett falls 25 feet off a building with no problem and both of them are in a nasty car crash in a train station and again, not a scratch. They must have got some special serum off of Captain America.

mothman

I don't understand what happened at the end. BW just stands there as SHIELD are coming to arrest her when she could just fly off with the other Widows. Next thing it's suddenly two weeks later and she's free and has finally dyed her hair blonde like she was going to before her trailer's generator ran out of fuel (did she go back to Norway to get that hair dye?).

I presume they left it ambiguous in case they wanted to shoehorn in another film (like they did with the third Bourne film, around the final scene of the second one, which still annoys me incidentally) eventually - if SJ is willing even after the lawsuit was resolved...

touchingcloth

Do you mean the fourth Bourne? The Jeremy Fucking Renner one?

Goldentony

is anyone asking for Black Widow 2 though? These films make money whatever happens so they can greenlight anything but this just seemed to make as much impact as a late 90s techno thriller youd get on video two years after it came out and looked as interesting as a big load of fuck all

olliebean

Nobody was asking for Black Widow 1. And yet...

mothman

Quote from: touchingcloth on December 06, 2021, 12:02:42 AMDo you mean the fourth Bourne? The Jeremy Fucking Renner one?
No, most of the plot of Bourne Ultimatum (2nd film) takes place before the final scene of B Supremacy (3rd), which is retconned to be some time after the rest of the film, and then the final action sequence of BU follows on from that final scene of - heh! - BS.

Then B Legacy happens, and eventually Jason B.

touchingcloth

Quote from: mothman on December 06, 2021, 05:01:30 PMNo, most of the plot of Bourne Ultimatum (2nd film) takes place before the final scene of B Supremacy (3rd), which is retconned to be some time after the rest of the film, and then the final action sequence of BU follows on from that final scene of - heh! - BS.

Then B Legacy happens, and eventually Jason B.

But Ultimatum is the 3rd film. This is some very confusing BS!

mothman

Aargh! You see?! It's so confusing! Five films, and three, arguably four, of them don't need to exist. OK, correction:

QuoteNo, most of the plot of Bourne Supremacy (2nd film) takes place before the final scene of B. Ultimatum (3rd), which is retconned to be some time after the rest of the film, and then the final action sequence of BS - heh! - follows on from that final scene of BU.

Then B. Legacy happens, and eventually Jason B.

Mister Six

Mrs Six made me watch this. I know that to some extent all of the Marvel films/shows now are corporation-mandated exercises in IP maintenance, but even by that low standard this seemed to be nothing but a contractual obligation for almost everyone involved. This wasn't a story that needed to be told about a character that's already dead anyway - it really felt like it was commissioned only because (a) Marvel would look bad if they never put out a Scarlett Johannson vehicle despite her being an Oscar-nominated box office draw, and (b) they wanted to get another Black Widow in place for future IP extensions.

Still, it doesn't excuse the film basically being (with the exception of the intro, which was quite good) completely emotionally dead for the whole fucking first act and most of the second, basically until the dinner table scene. There's no on-screen emotional connection between her and the bad guy, and for some reason she has absolutely no reaction whatsoever to being reunited with her long-lost "sister", so for most of the movie you're just watching a bunch of people who just happen to be caught in one another's orbit engaging in joyless, bland, unbelievable action scenes in which human beings are thrown around like rag dolls but somehow come through unscathed. Add to that Natalya being basically a passenger in her own film and you have a fully sumberged squib.

There are also too many scenes where the heroes act completely blase, like they know the nameless goons can't kill them. The bit where Yelena crouches in full view in the helicopter door and bullets THUD-THUD-THUD from her right to her left but somehow miss her is stupid. Shit like that is something you can fix with simple guidance to the actors ("Look concerned but determined, duck your head out briefly, then quickly spin into view and fire"), it's not that fucking hard.

The script is sloppy, too. The sisters escape Taskmaster after being thrown by chance into a random subway station - that turns out to be the same one Nat and Clint hid in years before? Nat is shocked that her sister would steal a guy's car, even though it's a life-or-death struggle and she's done way more dubious things before (and would, later on go and help injure/murder a bunch of prison guards)? Ray Winstone has a load of super-assassins so he can stealthily control the world, except that they all run around with specialist gear and wear uniforms, rather than being Manchurian Candidate-type embedded civilians (like Nat's family was at the start of the movie, if you're looking for thematic coherence...)?

It's not completely terrible - Florence Pugh and David Harbour are both fantastic, and I look forward to seeing them in something actually good, and there are some funny jokes - but it feels completely hollow and meaningless, like a 1990s straight-to-video sequel that somehow has A-list talent and a budget in the hundreds of millions.

Mister Six

Fuck, I just remembered the bit where Florence Pugh is going to blow up the baddies' jet, and Nat screams at her not to do it, but she does and -- her eyebrows aren't even singed.

Like, yeah, she then falls off the flying fortress and Nat has to save her, but it's clearly the threat of explosive death that's the stake in that scene, not the shockwave somehow pushing Yelena into the air without somehow breaking her bones/knocking her unconscious/rendering her permanently deaf.

SHIIIIIITTTTTT.

I was similarly annoyed with Falcon being able to just use Captain America's shield in his TV series. It's fine to have heroes that are regular humans with extraordinary skills, but you can't treat them like they're all mainlining super soldier serum on the sly.

druss

It's one of the worst, if not the worst, MCU film. Only mildly saving grace was Florence Pugh being entertaining but that was far from enough to save the film.

kalowski

But, as in Hawkeye, Pugh's "Russian" accent is fucking grating.

Glebe

Quote from: kalowski on April 06, 2022, 10:38:33 AMBut, as in Hawkeye, Pugh's "Russian" accent is fucking grating.


Ant Farm Keyboard

The funniest thing to me is that they hired a largely British cast with dodgy accents to play Russian parts, and that the only actor (apart from Mila Jovovich's daughter) with ties to the Soviet Union, Olga Kurylenko, is the mute.

The scene with the pigs in the maze was fine.

Mister Six

Oh, that was Olga Kurylenko?! What a waste

Re-reading what I wrote, I think I'm not as down on this film as I appear. It's not as aggressively terrible as a Snyder film, and I was never really bored when watching it, just emotionally unengaged and somewhat irritated by the sloppiness. But in retrospect it's aggravating that they took a great cast and a fine opportunity for a Winter Soldier-style punchy action thriller and turned it into CGI-riddled generic action slop with indestructible people (how shit was the bomb that left the villain unscathed and only scarred a little girl who was stood right next to it?) and a lazy script.

phantom_power

Ray Winstone livens the thing up with his truly awful Russney accent. "I haf trafelled fvom Moscow, you muppet"