Going to see another Marvel movie makes me feel like a housewife returning to the same drunken pig for yet another beating. This movie—if you can even apply the word in this case and believe it’s really the same type of thing as To Have and Have Not or On the Waterfront—must be among the dullest ever produced.
And produced is the operative work—it looks and feels to be exactly what it is: a composite work of digitalised celluloid Lego with all the lustre of a term paper on why wokeness is just more white privilege. There is not a single line of dialogue that resembles how people actually speak, and the march to diversify is in this instance embodied by some void in the English Stage Acting mode, like they thought reverting to a time before great movie acting was an ace move.
It’s another pay check call for Scarlett Johansson in a career that at this point looks astonishingly complacent, and lucky—even if she evinced a nicely understated, touchingly guileless impression in Ghost World and Lost In Translation, and was one of very few actors resembling a movie star from the Golden Age who could also act. Aside from the hardware of Johansson herself—and she is not shown here to her best advantage in any way, shape, or form, being fully dressed in a leather motorcycle one-piece throughout—the best realised aspect of Avengers #who knows? is futuristic super-planes.
Everything else is spinning kicks and well-executed parries, but without feeling. I am sure I have seen her do very decent-looking fight scenes before—but, here, you might as well be watching gameplay of Mortal Kombat, it’s that unconvincing, if slick.
Which is my point, I think, if I have one: reality is messy so, without light and shade, and things going wrong some of the time, you have no way of relating to what’s onscreen.
I am not sure I can even say anything about the plot—I had literally no bearings for what I was watching other than a vague recollection of seeing Johannson in some previous Avengers-type snooze-a-rama—so we’re not going to talk about it. What I can say is that there there are a lot of Russians—purported Russians, really—one of them being Ray Winstone, who has the decency to do a technically proficient acting job.
If super heroes have super powers, Black Widow’s seem to be advanced level kickboxing, and ability to fire Imperial Storm Trooper Mogadon-overdose laser bolts from her wrists. If she is a spider of some kind, I’m a banana.
So, it may be more productive briefly to review the careers of these two stars—kind of star, in the case of Winstone, if you count starring roles in movies no one saw and character bits in major releases. Let’s rank their respective outputs.
Actually, that would take way too long, so let’s go with my highly edited version.
Scarlett Johannson
The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) Don’t even recall her being in this but, in the current spirit of grade inflation, let’s give her an A*
Ghost World (2001) A* again
Lost in Translation (2003) A*—not bad, so far
Match Point (2005)—I might have to look at this again, but as I recall one of the few watchable elements in one of many Woody Allen nadirs
The Island (2005)—Uh, I don’t completely remember, but wasn’t this garbage? Let’s say B+, just to be charitable.
The Black Dahlia (2006) A
Vicky Cristina Barcelone (2008) B
Iron Man 2 (2010) You can’t really even see anyone else on-screen when the luminescent Robert Downey, Jr. is in a scene, but probably B+, rising to an A on appeal
Lucy (2014) B+
…And literally everything since has been a stream of crap.
Ray Winstone
Scum (TV movie, 1979) A* before anyone was awarded one
Nil by Mouth (1997) A*
Sexy Beast (2000) A*
Ripley’s Game (2002) A-
The Departed (2006) A
Beowulf (2007) F—if you can call this kind of CGI horseshit acting
King of Thieves (2018) C-
Conclusion
Both are poster people for selling out, but Winstone edges it based on heart.
FATAL VISIONS 