Even in the intensely over-saturated comic book movie environment that we find the industry in at the start of 2024, I think it is fair to say there has not been as obscure a character plucked for a movie adaptation as Madame Web. She is ostensibly a side character in the greater Spider-Man canon, known mostly as a precognitive mentor for other heroes. Sony, which has for years now been scraping the bottom of the barrel of characters specific to the Spider-Man universe they have the rights to, has reached a new threshold with their Madame Web movie -vainly attempting to draw in casual audiences with a character native to deep comic lore. They try to cover for this via allusions to Spider-Man, both in costume aesthetics and more familiar figures on the sidelines, but it reeks entirely of desperation and a dearth of creativity.
Such is the trend of the modern superhero movie as Madame Web does a fine job epitomizing its decline, from the Sony camp the way The Marvels did from the MCU and the last Aquaman did from DC. Its protagonist is Cassie Webb (a half-hearted Dakota Johnson), a New York paramedic in 2003 the movie goes to great pains to emphasize is friends with (Uncle) Ben Parker (Adam Scott). Due to circumstances of her birth, which happened deep in the Amazon at the cost of her mother’s life, she finds she can see into the future and begins using this power to save three teenage girls from assassination by a man with similar abilities as well as super-spider venom.
It is a strained premise, to be charitable -foresight is not a superpower that is particularly amenable to the action-first requirements of most superhero movies. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing though as it forces a certain degree of creativity in how to approach confrontations. Unfortunately though, Madame Web has an extremely non-creative pool of figures driving it, from the inexperienced-in-feature-filmmaking director S.J. Clarkson to the writing duo of Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, who have written exclusively bland screenplays, including most recently (also for Sony) Morbius. But of course above them is Sony themselves, invested in the movie being as safe and formulaic as possible. And so in place of superhero on supervillain action, the movie jumps through hoops to present the mostly ordinary Cassie as some equivalent force to be reckoned with -and the only idea seems to be that she can ram cars into the enemy.
The forcing of this subject matter square peg into a generic superhero round hole extends also to the characterization itself -not merely the dramatic backstory of Cassie’s mother dying in childbirth in Peru while under the care of a stereotyped indigenous tribe of spider-people as a way of explaining her latent powers, but the very way her journey to heroism is contrived. She just by happenstance winds up on the same subway as all three of the girls (who don’t actually know each other), saving them while insisting she’s not trying to save them, and then kidnapping them without choosing to provide any explanations for her actions or identity. The script treats it all with that familiar jokey lack of seriousness found in every superhero movie now, but all it does is shine an even brighter spotlight on how weak the story mechanics are. Cassie’s motivations until very late in the movie are incomprehensible as she juggles between denying and exploiting her ‘great responsibility’. The girls too are very thinly defined and so conveniently compatible in terms of their parent-less backstories, and the quickened pace of their developing friendship and maternal affection for Cassie (which feels not too unlike Stockholm Syndrome), that it’s perfectly absurd. They go from strangers with archetype personalities to sisters almost entirely in the background of their own abduction.
These girls are played by Isabella Merced, Celeste O’Connor, and one of the sharpest rising stars of the moment, Sydney Sweeney. And for most of the movie they are forced to act as simply the human macguffins they are; singled out for what they are destined to do in the future, while in the present they are extremely inactive characters with flat personalities that none of the actresses, not even Sweeney, are capable of bringing life to. They’re also quite close in age to Dakota Johnson which makes so much of the relationship as written play awkwardly. The girls are too old for the petty behaviours and teenage naivety they express, while Madame Web is too young to authentically be their wise mother figure -she comes across much more as an older sister. That is when she doesn’t appear completely disinterested -which Johnson often does throughout this movie. As she runs through exposition and quips and intentionally emotional moments, the ambivalence undercutting her performance cannot be suppressed. She may be fully aware of how bad the movie she’s in is, but her resigned attitude about it all only makes it worse. Also sleepwalking through performances are Scott, whose dialogue mostly consists of allusions to the Parker family, and Emma Roberts as the little Spider-Man’s pregnant mother.
French actor Tahar Rahim is cast as Ezekiel Sims, the villain of the piece who of course worked with Cassie’s mother and now conspires to kill the girls his foresight tells him will one day kill him. He has a menacing enough look but rarely the chance to fully utilize it; because for reasons of either sheer technical incompetency or poor English on the part of Rahim, the character is just about entirely ADR’d in brazenly apparent ways. Every time he speaks, the camera awkwardly cuts away from his face -either to a reverse-shot or from an angle that conceals his mouth-, or he’s seen at some degree of distance that still fails to disguise the fact his words don’t match his lip movements. It’s the kind of major technical gaff rarely seen in professional studio movies, yet it is only the most overt of several examples in Madame Web. The editing is quite sloppy, so that instances of Cassie’s foresight are presented haphazardly as though the film itself is skipping. And the CGI is pretty bad too, from Peruvian natives hopping through trees like video game characters to the contours of Sims’ attacks in his spider-suit, which is just a generic Spider-Man costume painted black. By the climax it seems that every artist on the film had just given up entirely.
Really, nothing in Madame Web suggests more than the least bit of effort -something it has in common with a lot of superhero media in the last couple years. But on top of that, it is altogether lame -in concept, approach, aesthetics, there is nothing to justify this story’s value and everything to indicate it is mere cynical brand management. Sony is in a rough place when it comes to the superhero, having long now exhausted the pool it owns of notable or compelling characters (Spider-Man and Venom are really the only ones); and the desperation in this movie and the long-delayed upcoming Kraven the Hunter is self-evident. But bewildering or obscure sources have made for decent to good films in this genre before -what kills Madame Web is its utter dependence on the superhero formula, which gives way to empty action and a horrendous script that bleakly oversells its own significance. A day is soon coming when this genre is depleted dry, and when it does, Madame Web will be one of the starkest symbols of the reasons for its demise.
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