Movie Review: ‘Madame Web’

Director: S.J. Clarkson

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O’Connor, Isabela Merced, Tahar Rahim, Mike Epps, Emma Roberts, Adam Scott

Plot: Cassie Webb is a paramedic who dies in an accident, unlocking the powers that were bestowed on her in the womb when her mother was bitted by a rare spider during childbirth. Cassie now has the powers to see slightly into the future, a power she uses to protect three girls who will one day become Spider-Women and are being hunted by an evil Spider-Man who has seen into the future and knows they will kill him one day.

Review: Sony, sit down. We need to talk. We know that you almost got something happening with the Venom movies. They haven’t had much staying power, but it could have been the start of a ball rolling towards something bigger. Than Morbius became a meme and synonymous with bad superhero movies, that wasn’t great, you could have recovered. Now you have Madame Web and honestly, what are you doing? What is this meant to be? We get that the only big draw card you have is the rights to the Spider-Man universe, but we really have to question the decisions being made.

These are not the characters from the Spider-Man universe that people want to see. Venom has got huge recognisability, he’s a popular character who has long been considered one of the great Spider-Villains. Then you decided that the villains to make solo movies of are…Morbius the living vampire, Madame Web the blind paraplegic and Kraven the Hunter. These are not characters people are clamouring to see. You’re not even going to get the Spider-Fans on board because you rewrite the characters to the point that they’re barely recognisable (Kraven the Animal Lover?). It’s worth noting that much of the MCU succeeded because they took their cues from the comic originals. Of course, you’re making these changes because you want the villains to be heroes for some reason, and you don’t want them to lose their edge and their grit, so they’re tonally up and down.

Our first thought is that of course you have to use the villains, because that’s who you have. Spider-Man is hanging out with the cool kids at the Avengers table, you have to make do. Except that you don’t, because in this movie you HAVE three up-and-coming young actors, one of which is about to make the A-List, all of whom play characters in Madame Web who are going to become three distinct Spider-Women. It’s just a shame that they don’t become Spider-Women in this movie, they only serve as a plot point in this abysmal story and we’re not going to see them again. Sony – why didn’t you just make a Spider-Women movie with these three? The glimpses we got were interesting, one had psychic webs and one had gnarly spider arm things, but they never become that and I have no idea why you didn’t do that instead of whatever this idea was.

Our latest entry into the Sony Spider-Verse Thingie begins in Peru where Cassie’s mother is studying spiders. As almost every line of dialogue in this movie is a clunky bit of exposition we are quickly told that this is a very rare spider with venom that will ‘supercharge your entire system’ and she’s pregnant and Ezekiel Sims (Rahim) is her security detail and there’s a myth about poisonous spider-people living in the trees. All of this is more or less packaged in one line. Anyway, Cassie’s mother finds the spider off screen, and Sims does a betrayal and shoots her to steal the spider because his “path hasn’t been as straight forward as yours” whatever that means. Then a bunch of spider-people wearing weird web-shaped nets come crawling out of trees and take Cassie’s mother to a special cave where they get the spider to bite her and then she gives birth and she dies.

We will note that they’ve completely obliterated the uniqueness of Peter Parker in this universe by giving a bunch of nameless, faceless randos in a jungle Spider-Man powers. It’s not even a radioactive, genetically altered spider or something, they’re just rare spiders than anyone can get spider powers from.

We jump ahead to the early 2000s where Cassie Web (Johnson) is a paramedic along with her partner Ben Parker (Scott), where they spend their day explaining their backstory out loud. We cannot emphasise how clunky the dialogue is, it really is a terrible script that gets delivered with all the passion of a damp tissue. While the characters say things like “this is like when I was in the army” and “my mother died while studying spiders in Peru”, we also learn that Cassie Web is an absolutely miserable character. A downright horrible person. After they drop an injured woman off at the hospital, having fought to keep her alive, a doctor comes out to tell them that she’s going to live. Cassie responds with “who?”, having already forgotten about this person who’s life was in her hands a few moments earlier. Then the family come to thank them and she acts surprised, like people thanking someone for saving a loved ones life is an unreasonable suggestion. She has to be convinced to take the drawing a kid has done for her, to which she responds “what am I supposed to do with this?”

Cassie is a shitty, unpleasant, uncharismatic character and I don’t want to spend a whole movie watching her and her dumb superpowers, but we’re just at the beginning of a 2 hour running time here. She eventually falls off a bridge and drowns, but Ben saves her and now she’s unlocked her special spider powers. Unlike other spider powers, Cassie can see a little bit into the future. Sometimes it’s months in advance, sometimes it’s minutes, sometimes she resets back to where she started, sometimes she stays in the spot she moved to during the vision. Having precognition powers certainly doesn’t stop her from being a raging idiot, however. Her one goal is keep three potential Spider-Women safe, and her first move is to drive them out to the middle of the forest and LEAVE THEM THERE with nothing for hours while she goes to rummage through an old suitcase speak exposition out loud to herself. After this genius plan of abandoning them in the forest to starve falls apart, her next plan is to leave them with a friend for several weeks so she can pop down to Peru for some more exposition.

Big points for Cassie finding the exact location her mother looked at a spider web by matching up a photo of a random bit of river with the actual river. How she found that exact spot of deep jungle that has been unchanged for 30 years is perplexing to say the least, but she does find a nameless character who explains more backstory to her.

Anyway, they’re trying to escape from Sims who has an evil Spider-Man suit for some reason, and is trying to use his spider strength to murder the potential Spider-Women because he keeps having a bad dream about them. He’s gathered together a bunch of NSA tech to track them down, but it somehow doesn’t work on Ben Parker’s house for three weeks. He also has some psychic fights with Madame Web, and when he first attacks he’s invisible to bystanders. We know this because the main characters all keep saying “can no-one else see him?” This is never explained and it never comes back. Madame Web’s powers are also a bit nebulous, and during the finale she unlocks a new power that allows her to float and shoot out a couple of ghosts of herself that can help out, but this is also never repeated or referenced again. No-one even comments on it.

As well as evil Spider-Man and Madame Web, we have Julia (Sweeney), Mattie (O’Connor) and Anya (Merced) as three teenagers who bad Spider-Man has a vision of becoming Spider-Women. These characters are summed up as being the nice one with glasses, the mean one with a skateboard and the maths one who does maths. Sadly they are afflicted with the same level of idiocy that have struck the rest of the cast. While they’re left in the forest after a costumed mad-man tried to murder them, they decide that they’re so hungry (within less than 3 hours, they mention that it’s been 3 hours) that they’re going to wander off to a diner. After discussing the importance of laying low, not making eye contact, just get in and out they start ordering massive meals of many different dishes because of how STARVING they are after a few hours and then, for some insane reason that makes no sense for the characters, they decide to DANCE ON A DINER TABLE FOR SOME RANDOM BOYS THEY NOTICED. One does mention that you just HAVE to dance to ‘Toxic’ by Britney Spears, but we’d also just heard on the radio that this was a brand new song, so…what is happening?

One of the more irksome parts of this movie is that all three of these actors are really noteworthy up-and-coming stars. We’ve enjoyed their performances in previous work from The White Lotus through to Dora the Explorer. Setting them up to be a trio of different Spider-Heroes and never actually doing that is really disappointing. We said it up top, but it’s worth repeating: THAT is the movie you should have made.

We’ve barely untangled the mess of a story we’ve ended up here, or unpacked the many plot holes, the obviously re-dubbed dialogue, the uninspired visual design. By the end of the movie it doesn’t seem likely that Madame Web is going to team up with other parts of this universe, and there’s a noticeable lack of a credits scene to link them together.

I guess we should consider the real purpose of this movie, and that’s to promote Pepsi. Barely a scene goes by without a character cracking open a Pepsi or Mountain Dew, talking about Pepsi, holding their Pepsi up to the camera. It is one of the most egregious examples of product placement in recent memory, and if you think I’m exaggerating, the final battle with the villain takes place on a giant Pepsi sign.

There’s not a single good line of dialogue in this movie, everything sounds awkward and unnatural. The performances are stiff and it feels like no-one wanted to be there. We have to say it: we enjoyed Morbius more than this. In that bland misadventure we at least get Matt Smith having a good time, and that’s better than anything in this ‘Spider-Man’ thing. The only positive we have is that the younger cast members almost manage to shine through the material.

Rating: TWO out of TEN