Spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
- The prologue showing an 11-year-old Natasha grabbing a gun off a soldier and aiming it at the others to protect little Yelena.
- Oksana, the rebel Widow at the film's start, gets hit by a car and cornered by a brainwashed Yelena, who not only stabs Oksana in the gut but twists the knife to disable her. But in her dying moments, Oksana hits Yelena with the antidote to the mind control, and passes on her mission to "free the others."
- The fight between Natasha and Yelena when they first meet as adults. Both of them are almost evenly matched, with the first move being both breaking a Mexican Standoff by doing a simultaneous disarm and ending up just pointing each other's guns right back where they started. The duel ends with a truce when they nearly strangle each other with a curtain.
- Natasha and Yelena's escape from the Widows in Budapest, full of incredible driving stunts across multiple vehicles. Yelena takes out a pursuing Widow on a motorcycle by grabbing the wheel from Natasha to spin the car 180 degrees and throws open her door, breaking it off on a lamppost so it knocks the pursuing Widow off her bike.
- Natasha and Yelena breaking Alexei out of prison, culminating in Yelena causing an avalanche that buries the facility in snow.
- Dreykov developed a pheromone to prevent any of his Widows from attacking him. Melina had earlier notified Natasha about this and the solution to prevent the pheromone from affecting her, which is to "sever the nerve". Natasha does so by intentionally severing a nerve in her nasal passage via breaking her nose, and then proceeds to give Dreykov a well-deserved beatdown.
- Melina gets locked out of the Red Room's control systems by Dreykov, so she's unable to land it, and trapped where she is. So she breaks out her old Red Room training, crawls through the vents, makes it to one of the facility's engines, and while "surrendering" to a crowd of well-armed men, fires one well-placed shot to disable the entire airship.
- Really, Natasha's entire confrontation with Dreykov. It looks like her infiltration has failed, and he has her at his mercy due to his pheromone control. But once again, she uses this position to get him to spill his entire Evil Plan, and even see how Dreykov accesses his computer, giving Nat a chance to swipe the ring needed to unlock it. Even her pressing his Berserk Button to make him beat her was just a way to break her nose and nullify his pheromone control, and the only hitch was that the guy was too weak to do a proper job of it, forcing Natasha to slam her face into his desk and break it herself. The only thing that went wrong was the other Widows showing up at the very last second. Otherwise, Dreykov would have been screwed.
- This is followed by a sequence where Natasha goes up against a few dozen widows by herself and holds them off for several minutes. Honestly, if it had been one less, she might not have needed Yelena's help.
- Dreykov is about to get away, but Yelena quite literally jumps into action to stop him, leaping onto his getaway Osprey and then prepares to destroy one of its turbines, with no expectations of surviving. Yelena shouts "This was fun!" to a distraught Natasha before ramming the baton into the turbine, causing an explosion that knocks her off the Red Room's dock and kills Dreykov. Now THAT is a "cool way to die".
- This is immediately followed by Natasha's Big Sister Instinct going into overdrive. She leaps off the exploding Red Room with a parachute in hand, dodges several tons of falling debris, manages to catch up with Yelena's unconscious body, attaches said parachute to Yelena, then lets go to fight Taskmaster in freefall, and survives! Steve Rogers wishes he could do something so epic.
- To summarize the movie, Nat starts out on the run from General Ross and other authorities for her role in Captain America: Civil War. And while on the run, she reconnects with her previous family and, with just those three other people, infiltrates and tears the heart out of a global human trafficking/brainwashing/terrorist organization, and acquires the information necessary to root it out for good. And then she goes back to bail out the other Avengers who were incarcerated at the end of Civil War, like shutting down the Red Room was just something to knock out over the weekend before getting back to her day job.
- It also proves that despite not having any fancy super strength or armor or magic hammer, there is a reason why Natasha is an Avenger. She's not lesser to her colleagues, she's a goddamn equal.
- At the film's end, Natasha escaping General Ross and all his men is such a given that the movie simply cuts to two weeks later, as she prepares to rescue the other Avengers from the Raft.
- And the ending also contextualizes Captain America's own Offscreen Moment of Awesome from Civil War. Just how did he break into the Raft on his own? Easy: he had Natasha helping him.
- Seeing Taskmaster bust out the Avengers' moves and dominate every fight she is in until near the end is epic. She has Cap's Shield throwing, Hawkeye's archery, Black Widow's martial arts, Black Panther's claws, Winter Soldier's knife skills and Spider-Man's acrobatics at the very least.
- Taskmaster visibly overpowers and outmanoeuvres every character in the film, only being defeated when Natasha is able to free her from Dreykov's programming, so it's pretty impressive that Alexei, of all people, puts up a decent fight against her. Sure, he's clearly on the losing end throughout, but he bats her shield away as if it was nothing, has the presence of mind to help Melina lock her in one of the Red Room's cells, and gets back up to continue fighting his way out as if nothing had happened.
- During the helicopter flight, Alexei asks Yelena if she's on her period. She responds by explaining that she doesn't get periods because she was forced through a hysterectomy, and then goes into graphic detail about what that entails while Alexei is immensely uncomfortable, effectively flipping a sexist joke on its head. Even better, the joke was initially written as a straight "angry women are on their periods" joke by a male writer, and the female director decided to turn it into a commentary instead of cutting it.
- Give the Devil his due, despite his loathsomeness, Dreykoff is a highly competent villain, having achieved what even Loki, Ultron and the Red Skull could not: actually successfully taking over the world, with no one even noticing!
