Just finished this. I thought it was decent - pretty much on par with Spiderman FFH in the post-Endgame output. Beats all the Disney+ shows for me.
So Spiderman FFH/Black Widow
WandaVision
Loki
Falcon & Winter Soldier
Way late to the party here but I finally watched (IMAX Enhanced, woohoo) Black Widow last night and I echo the sentiments above. I kind of had the impression that this film was universally panned but ended up being pleasantly surprised.
No it isn't great by any means but I found it enjoyable, mostly due to the likability of the main cast and their chemistry together. I also really liked the spectacle of the prison break and falling satellite sequences and ScarJo and Flo both looked great in their cool white suits.
I had totally forgotten about BW's face disguising mask that she wore in TWS so it was fun to see that make a return.
The plot borrowed heavily from other MCU entries (most notably TWS with her having to take down the corrupt Widow program just like Cap had to take down corrupt SHIELD, complete with collapsing helicarrier/satellite station at the end) but I suppose that's no big surprise.
I admit it was pretty eye rolling that *every single* government trained assassin in the Widow program was deep down innocent and good but was just mind controlled. Ugh, come on now. That gave it a bit of a Captain Marvel/Mulan/women-are-oppressed-by-the-Patriarchy vibe but I'm either getting numb to this crap or it just wasn't offensive enough to ruin the film. Either way it was still noticeable and a strike against the movie simply because it would have been fun to see her have to fight more Widows to the death (or any to the death for that matter.)
But at least she *did* fight them unlike the unfulfilled tease of Cap and Bucky fighting a squad of unfrozen Winter Soldiers in CW.
I enjoyed the Taskmaster scenes, they were fun in a Terminator-esque kind of way and certainly more fun than any actual Terminator movie since 1991, lol.
Since the gender of TM had been spoiled for me (not complaining, it's no surprise since I waited this long to watch it) I was very worried that she'd turn out to be BW's biological mother, lol. Thank GOD she wasn't and maybe just because I was expecting the worst the actual reveal turned out to be kind of cool IMO.
This film does suffer from the same "pointlessness" with regard to it's place in the Infinity Saga as BP and CM. Just a harmless one-off with some good and bad but that otherwise doesn't really elevate or diminish the main narrative, which I suppose is a win. I mean damn it's unreal how many freaking movies Marvel can crank out that are at *worst* harmless fun. This movie did feel uniquely set apart from the main MCU since unless I'm mistaken it's the first stand-alone film that didn't feature a single cameo from anyone in the main MCU. I feel like if this had come out in 2017 (which it obviously should have) then we would have seen Cap and Falcon swooping down in a Quinjet to scoop her out of the satellite wreckage before Ross could get her thus setting up their team for IW, but because Evans made his dramatic curtain call in EG no way was he gonna come back for this, lol.
Florence was super cute in this despite her chubby baby face not at all making her look like a career assassin and acrobat, lol. Still though I'm totally on board for her filling Natasha's spot in the MCU going forward.