SPOILERS AHEAD: Oddly enough, I almost feel like I need to defend liking Black Widow and the portrayal of Taskmaster. Since a lot of the reaction to the movie revolves around this villain, I am going to focus on the Taskmaster more than I would have normally.
The movie opens with a flashback to a Russian spy cell operating out of Ohio in 1985, posing as a married couple with two kids, to steal some tech secrets. Father Alexei (David Harbour) comes home one night and tells them they have been found out and they need to leave immediately. They grab some stuff and hurry to an airfield, the U.S. government hot on their trail. They barely manage to escape in a small plane and head to Cuba, where the two “daughters” are drugged and eventually placed in the Red Room program for creating female spies/assassins.
Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) winds up with some vials of a red mist that undoes a chemical brain-washing process used to control the Red Room Widows. She meets up with her sister Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) and the movie unfolds as a James Bond-style spy thriller where the family reunites to stop the Red Room mastermind Dreykov (Ray Winstone) from using the Widows (scattered throughout the world now) to control world events.
In the comics, Taskmaster is Tony Masters, a mercenary who is able to replicate fighting techniques (armed and unarmed) by watching them live or on video. In Black Widow, Taskmaster is the bad guy’s daughter, also mind-controlled, but also enhanced with some neural microchip technology goodness. She is a pure example of mindless muscle serving an evil boss, doesn’t even talk during her fight sequences. The fact she doesn’t talk in any of the trailers should have been a tipoff this was going to be a very different treatment of the character.
I’m fine with this. The trailer never conveyed that Taskmaster had a character arc that would be explored. Devoting more plot to Taskmaster would have taken away from the other characters — this movie did not need to get stuffed like Batman and Robin or Spider-Man 3. I believe Taskmaster will be back in some other form in the future, and thank goodness, they lost the cape and hood.
