SPOILERS
It was definitely enjoyable but sloppy and underwritten. I have a hard time giving this a high rating because of some of the issues I personally had with it. First, the action overshadowed the underdeveloped story too much, and arguably unnecessarily. The story had some very interesting subject matter that they just barely scratched the surface on. I don't know if this story should have been an extra 20-30minutes longer to iron out everything necessary or cut back on the action, but all the personal and psychological issues and even backstories of the side characters and Natasha herself were just slapped together in a fast forward manner and truly didn't get the justice or explanation they deserved. Even the red circle didn't truly get a background of how girls are chosen and treated from beginning to end. It was sloppy. 2nd, some of the CGI mashing was Green Lantern bad. There were about a handful of scenes where you can clearly see a person go from being a person to being an animatedly fluid screen character. When we aren't dealing with Godzilla or King Kong or Transformers, that's kind of unforgivable in an action movie, especially one that cost $200 million to make. Thirdly, Johansson was out acted by Pugh and less interesting than all the other side characters. Yelena spent almost her entire life brainwashed and who's only moments of clarity, joy, and personal relationships in her life was as a child with a 'fake' spy family. What type of trauma and pain and backstory and awakening to an outside world is she going through, all slammed onto in a moment's notice no less. Red Guardian must have a fruitful history, including a vast amount wartime and battle experience and a likely interesting sequence that caused him to end up in prison. Melina, the most underutilized side character, or the Iron Maiden, might be the most intriguing character of them all: groundbreaking neuroscientist, experienced spy and red room descendant, future or past enemy of the black widow per the comics, and the only side character that has been actively working with the red room, and cognizantly so, continually for the last 30-40years. And Scarlett, only crux being that she is on the run after Age of Ultron, is the main character and main focus here? That's a mistake. This standalone "origin" story for Black Widow turned into a disctracting side show and introduction of her "family". It personally didn't do Johansson's character the avenger origin/backstory it deserved if that was the true purpose, which I thought was because they killed her future off in the MCU. Thirdly, the villains. You can't underdevelop or underutilize villains in a superhero movie or the "good vs evil battle" loses weight and suspense. Taskmaster was underused and ultimately just became a plot twist and Dreykov barely gets screen time and his biggest on screen feat is pheromone defense? Really? Lastly, I'm nitpicking but I believe every single action seen in this movie was in one of the couple major trailers that were put out by the studio, some even had a few spoiler Easter eggs, some big spoilers to the sequence of the movie.
That said, it's fun popcorn entertainment, and on a popcorn entertainment level it gives your brain more to think about than it has to between the actions sequences and jokes. All depends on how you look at this movie and what you want out of it. I'm happy it's going to have great box office success though and hopefully push production companies to gamble on more mid and bigger budget movies going forward during this corona pandemic age. I personally just felt like it was messy and made too many mistakes with it's on screen product. If it really wanted to go this family introduction route, it should have went full bore with a different title/non-character specific title and truly filled in the blanks and developed the deep intriguing characters and villains it threw at you in snap neck speed.
