This article contains spoilers for Black Widow.
As Black Widow moves towards an incredibly promising weekend for movie theaters, it’s pretty much official that the MCU is back where it belongs, and although initial reviews are mostly calling the film a proper Marvel sendoff for Scarlett Johansson, it seems to have forgotten something along the way: villains.
Perhaps the most glaring reason for this could be that at the end of the day Black Widow ends up feeling like too little too late, a solid recreation of the Marvel formula that would be right at home in 2016 or 2017 to follow up on its chronological predecessor Captain America: Civil War. The fact of the matter is, that after being spoiled by some of the MCU’s finest villains in recent years, the premise of an antagonist that’s evil just for the sake of being evil comes off as a tougher pill to swallow.
While the trailers for Black Widow gave the impression that Taskmaster was bound to be Natasha and Yelena’s main enemy, it turns out the gender-swapped Antonia Dreykov was as much of a victim of the Red Room as they were. Instead, the mastermind behind this massive Soviet scheme for enlisting little girls as child soldiers is General Dreykov, who also happens to represent a nasty blast from the past for our protagonist.
For the audience, Dreykov is supposed to be a political villain, something akin to Arnim Zola, Red Skull, Alexander Pierce, or even Thaddeus Ross, but somehow he lacks that kind of motivation because he’s not looking to bring back Hydra -or in this case the KGB- nor disrupt the normal functioning of the US government. Though Dreykov gloats on having an army of Black Widows he can call upon to do his bidding for him, it’s not really clear what that is.
David Harbour’s performance as the Red Guardian ends up being quite funny precisely because he’s portrayed as a USSR relic who was sold onto the idea of fighting for the communist party and that gave him a misguided sense of purpose, as well super soldier abilities that greatly enhanced his ego. Alexei blames Dreykov for his downfall, he’s absolutely outside his element with his mission family, and yet he comes off as charming because of his naivety.
Dreykov is not naive, apparently. He has the resources to topple governments and wreck financial markets just as long as he remains outside the Avengers’ radar in his flying fortress, and in that regard, he almost mimics a James Bond villain from the cold war era. This is no coincidence as viewers find out the Black Widow is a big James Bond fan capable of reciting dialogue straight out from Moonraker, which happens to be the perfect 007 reference for the film’s plot.
So if Dreykov is Bond’s Hugo Drax that means Taskmaster is left to be Jaws, a mighty henchwoman (in this case his daughter), who’s capable of absolutely trashing our heroine in a 1v1 fight. Even if it’s amazing to see the MCU payoff movie references from nearly a decade ago, that Budapest story doesn’t do the same to solidify these villains as it does to make Natasha's relationship with Hawkeye or her surrogate family feel genuine.
Marvel Studios is known for taking many creative liberties with its comic source material and while it's absurd to fully dismiss its decision regarding Taskmaster, the outcome certainly doesn't hold up too well for her character. Like so many villains in the MCU's Phase One and Two, Taskmaster and Dreykov are essentially disposable with the latter now most definitely dead and the awoken Antonia left to find her place in the world with the rest of the Black Widows, but all with the caveat of no longer being relevant because it's now been quite some time since these events.
Olga Kurylenko's disfigured face is barely seen in the movie because just like Dreykov's scheme it's only framed from the perspective of Natasha and how those events defined so much of what she was in the MCU. To quote one too many Vin Diesel memes, Black Widow is about family and how it inevitably serves to finally give Natasha a posthumous origin story, all with the added bonus of introducing Yelena Belova as her charismatic would-be replacement under the Black Widow identity.
It might be too much to ask from a single movie to fully flesh out an entire family for a deceased superhero and also manage to surround them with villains that are somewhat memorable but rest assured Dreykov and Taskmaster are no recurring villains like Bond's Erst Stavro Blofeld, they are 100% like Moonraker's Hugo Drax, one-off enemies that appear in one entry before 007 can move on to his next adventure.
Taskmaster is supposed to be a force to be reckoned with for the Avengers due to his copycat abilities, and yet for all of Antonia's knack for fighting like Spider-Man and Captain America in Black Widow, the character and her evil father simply fall short of copying any of the traits of Marvel's best antagonists. Lacking that superpower five years ago was not a problem, but nowadays even an antihero like Loki can find a good villain to spare; on the other hand, Yelena is way cooler than Sam Wilson or Bucky ever were in their beginnings.