The biggest failing of this film is in its refusal to address the question "Do the ends justify the means?" Many villains of the MCU, from Killmonger to Thanos to HYDRA operative Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford), have espoused this worldview, and it has necessarily made them villainous to the audience and to the heroes of the story. Here, Black Widow would have been one of the best characters to explore this philosophical question from the point of view of a hero, but the film simply pushed that narrative away. We learn in the first Avengers movie that Nat killed her tormentor's daughter in order to free the slaves of the Red Room and stop the global cabal of human trafficking. Rather than show Nat suffering from the weight of this decision in her titular film, the movie instead focuses on her yearning for a family and a sense of belonging.
The thing is, Taskmaster is an excellent mirror/foil to Natasha here, since her dad is a bona fide villain and Taskmaster herself never really had a family, and was victim to Black Widow’s attack. When the film finally set up a chance for Taskmaster and Black Widow to answer the philosophical question at hand, they simply had Taskmaster shrug off her wounds, tacitly forgive Natasha, and make a quick comment that she was glad her birth father was dead. There was no exploration of Taskmaster or her complex moral dilemma that she was now facing as a newly-freed woman facing the woman who nearly killed her and scarred her for life. Instead she just hops in a helicopter full of strangers, abandoning the obvious trust-issues that she would be harboring, and flies off into the sunset. Not much an ending for this character and the film really didn’t do her justice.
Finally, in the scene I alluded to before, Natasha and her sister caused a huge avalanche that killed an untold number of prisoners, security guards, and prison personnel. At the very least, they opened fire on a bunch of prison guards with small arms fire before Yelena literally fried a bunch of them with an RPG. This means that their plan going in was to kill people whose only crime is working a job in Siberia to feed their families. All of this was so that the “heroes” could free their “Dad” to give them another chance at killing Taskmaster and taking down the Red Room. Do the ends really justify the means here? I don’t know, because the film didn’t dive deep enough into this dilemma to give us a real chance to explore it.
Like I said though, this was a good film. I’m way more excited about the finale of Loki than I was for this movie, but overall it slides nicely into an average or above-average MCU film. Certainly better than recent stand-alone entries like Ant-Man and the Wasp and Captain Marvel.
