I Just Saw

You know superhero movies are in trouble when studios start downplaying the fact they’re superhero movies. Sony’s marketing for Madame Web has focused on its supposed properties as a “suspense thriller”, which is a bit like trying to sell I Spit on Your Grave as a screwball comedy. Of course, anyone sensible knows it’s going to be a bad film even if they’ve somehow insulated themselves from the buzz around it. It’s distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing. It tells you it’s a bad movie as soon as the Sony logo appears, just as you know what you’re getting when you walk into McDonalds. The most you can hope for is pleasant mediocrity, the worst Morbius (2022). In line with the company’s frankly admirable thick-headedness, they’ve once again proved their commitment to consistency and churned out a product so dull and moronic that it’s become the focus of memes.

Where Morbius was slated for its stupid dialogue, non-sequitur scenes, bad effects, and overall insufferable lameness while trying to be cool – like, well, what it is: a bunch of non-creatives tossing out elements and placement deals for various products their filmmaking team then have to work in – Madame Web seems to have come under fire more generally for its sheer naffness and enervation. For example, the trailer line, “He was in the Amazon with my mom, when she was researching spiders, right before she died.” This seemingly innocuous dialogue became so known a meme an interviewer unwisely brought it up with its deliverer, star Dakota Johnson, who was merely baffled that anyone would find it notable. It does indeed seem strange at first, but I think what people were responding to was the sheer banality of the line, and the trailers in general. Audiences have grown so used to characters in these films making portentous statements in breathy voices that it’s passed the point of parody and lines like that feel redundantly expositional and clunky.

Comic book movies have become decadent. Theirs was never the most quality-conscious genre anyway, though some excellent entries by talented filmmakers built up financial returns that, coupled with a rising mainstream appreciation of nerd culture, evolved into a box office behemoth that’s decades old now. The law of entropy, however, has come into effect, and these films have grown lazier and lazier as they’ve become progressively more detached from anything other than a corporate egg-and-spoon race. Madame Webb is very much a dropped egg.

The “plot” of the film is that in 1973 Constance Webb (Kerry Bishé) is researching spiders when her assistant Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim) kills her and uses the creature she finds to gain superpowers. Just before she dies she gives birth to Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson), who thirty years later is a New York paramedic alongside Ben Parker (Adam Scott) – yes, that Ben Parker – when her latent psychic powers are activated by a plunge off a bridge into the waters below. She thereafter finds herself drawn to three teenage girls – Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Anya (Isabela Merced), and Mattie (Celeste O’Connor) – becoming their protector as they’re hunted by Sims. He’s plagued by visions of their coming maturity into Spider-Women, at which point they’ll kill him.

Madame Web has been eviscerated by critics and fans. Its biggest issue, though, is that it simply has no story or characters. What I’ve described above might sound like a plot, but it’s really just a rather senseless pseudo-narrative. Very little makes sense. For example, at one point Johnson’s character steals a NY cab, which we then see in the middle of the woods, where she leaves the three girls for several hours while she figures out her superpowers. Firstly, I don’t know New York, but I’d wager it takes some time to drive out into the middle of nowhere. You can’t just turn off 5th Avenue, cruise for a bit, and find yourself in Deliverance (1972) country, before leaving your guests there to listen out for banjos while you pop back to your apartment.

Secondly, the guests in this case are three vulnerable underage girls, one of whom is a runaway and another the child of deportees, fending for herself outside the system, who at one point admits that she doesn’t officially exist. And Web decides to leave them in light clothing in the woods near a truckers’ rest stop, for several hours, with the sun setting. Jesus Christ. It would honestly serve her right if she came back to three slaughtered Jane Does. And then she has the nerve to call them entitled brats for going to the rest stop where it’s warm and they can eat!

Bad guy Sims, meanwhile, doesn’t appear to have aged at all in the thirty years since Richard Nixon was still POTUS. I don’t recall the film saying that that’s a side effect of the spider venom, but who knows, maybe it is.

Still, he has no personality or even backstory. Sims might be the emptiest character I’ve seen in one of these movies. No personality, no motivation, and no real connection to the world around him. At least the villainess of The Marvels (2023) was a star tyrant with a grounding in science fantasy tropes. Hilariously, Madame Web implies that Sims gains access to incredible global surveillance tech by seducing one NSA woman. He does have a great body for a man who lived through the age of disco, to be fair, and the sort of smouldering intensity to give you confidence that you’ll be begging for mercy. I’d probably hop on board, national security be damned.

Dakota Johnson, on the other hand, is a fine actress but she needs better representation. Between this and the Fifty Shades films (2015 to 2018), she’s becoming typecast as Mary Sue-ish, pseudo-vulnerable whinge-bags without depth or wit. Her stellar work in the arthouse horror remake Suspiria (2018) was so refreshing partly because of its contrast with the lifeless misogynist caricature she’d been playing for three years. Madame Web in this context feels like a step back, even if she’s no longer being tied up and edged by abusive men with mummy issues.

The three girls are fine, delivering the clunky expositional dialogue about as well as anyone could have. None of the characters have character. They’re all just screenplay constructs to dangle in front of effects. And the effects are dreadful. The scene where Madame Web realises her powers, aside from being another facet of the narrative that makes no sense (she plunges into a river in a car yet somehow is outside of it immediately, and we don’t even see her rescue), is filmed with CGI that looks it’s from a TV show.

Madame Web is a dull, pathetically shoddy piece of work. It might have been something if it wasn’t an origin story but focused on Madame Web as a blind old woman, like she is in the comics, directing her Spider-Women to solve crimes. But that would require creativity, and you check creativity at the door when you agree to write for Sony Pictures.

Rating: 1/4