madame web

Madame Web is set in 2003, which is fitting since Sony continues to make comic book films as if we’re all still out here using iPods with scroll wheels. There’s a unique whiff of desperation to the studio’s live-action Spider-Verse. Given that Spider-Man’s ancillary characters are the one sliver of the Marvel universe that Sony controls, the desire to wring them of any MCU-adjacent gold dust - however sparse - is understandable… even if the end result is a fiddly attempt to rebrand various Spider-villains as franchise antiheroes (first Venom, then Morbius… with Kraven the Hunter looming on-deck). Madame Web, on the other hand, has traditionally served as a minor ally of Peter Parker at least, but there’s still the sense that Sony is increasingly force-feeding a non-existent appetite; the further the narrative strands venture from the web-swinger himself, the more desiccated they become.  

Dakota Johnson stars as Cassie Webb, a New York paramedic who begins experiencing glimpses of the future after a near-death experience. Her visions eventually lead her to a trio of teenage girls - Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Anya (Isabela Merced), and Mattie (Celeste O’Connor) - whose future destinies as a Spider-Woman collective has put them in the crosshairs of Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), a vaguely sketched baddie who’s plagued by nightmares of his eventual death at their hands. Sims also has enhanced strength and arachnid-like abilities thanks to a rare and powerful spider he was able to extract from the Peruvian jungle 30 years earlier… while not-so-coincidentally on an expedition with Cassie’s pregnant mother, whom he betrayed. Sims pursues the girls with Terminator-like relentlessness and Cassie’s fledgling abilities are the only thing keeping them a half-step ahead… which may seem like a heavy burden, but as she’s told (incredulously) at one point “When you take on the responsibility… great power will come.” 

Madame Web is no doubt a mediocre movie - fumbling and unconvincing in intention - but it’s hardly the once-in-a-generation cinematic calamity some would have you believe. There’s been an almost manic need on social media to meme the film into oblivion, to frame it as some sort of Sistine Chapel of awfulness (starting with the much-mocked “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders just before she died” line from the trailer (though notably absent from the actual film) that went viral for reasons unknown - it’s not especially funny). The end result is frankly no worse than early-aughts fodder such as Elektra, Catwoman, Blade: Trinity, The Punisher, or Fantastic Four (many seem to have deleted the pre-Iron Man landscape from memory). But such is the exhaustive reality of the cultural climate - every critical take has to be amplified to hyperbolic extremes for the sake of Twitter engagement and YouTube thumbnails. Every flag must be planted dramatically in a hill and frantically flown to draw attention to itself. It’s just plain embarrassing at this point.  

Dakota Johnson has a uniquely beguiling quality - a weave of the relatable and the unobtainable, part cute girl behind the shop counter and part beauty on the billboard - that Hollywood hasn’t quite figured out how to harness. She glides mostly unscathed through the narrative detritus, but there’s a slight whiff of embarrassment to her performance she can’t fully repress. It’s hard to buy into a movie fully when the lead actress can’t quite bring herself to do it. Cassie’s three charges have an appealingly bratty rapport, in spite of their schematic nature (Mattie’s the rebellious one; Anya’s the brainy one; and Julia’s the shy one, assuming you can buy Sydney Sweeney of all people as a bespectacled wallflower)… but if the intention was to lay the groundwork for their own Spider-Woman franchise, the enthusiasm levels remain pretty dormant. Rahim, meanwhile, is one of the weakest, least effectual comic book villains in recent memory… though his performance was seemingly crippled by sloppy slatherings of ADR in post-production. He probably deserves a pass, all things considered.      

It’s unclear how much blame should be laid at the feet of director SJ Clarkson - a British TV vet who’s worked on shows such as Succession and Dexter - who feels less like she was directing the film then she was steering it towards a release date. Madame Web is stricken with oddly shabby carpentry for such a big-budget feature (scenes often feel as if they were edited by meat cleaver)… but the more glaring issue is how limited and less-than-cinematic Cassie’s powers actually are. By the end of the movie, she’s leveled up into the titular heroine - able to sense the elaborate, web-like strands of fate that connect us all, not unlike Neo being able to see the Matrix - but this feels less like an origin pic than a tepid prelude to one. There’s little that’s enticing about a potential sequel. Clarkson, mercifully, skips the traditional post-credits fan service, so we don’t have to sit through Vulture and Morbius time-surfing to pitch some sort of alliance (we’ve already gotten a bellyful of that via the not-so-secret identity of Adam Scott as Cassie’s not-so-coincidental paramedic partner). Madame Web doesn’t exactly linger beyond the closing credits anyway; you brush it from your mind like cinematic cobwebs.