As many have noted as of late, the superhero genre has been going through a rough patch over the last couple of years, thanks to a combination of audience fatigue and a string of largely mediocre titles such as the latest entries in the Ant-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy and Aquaman franchises and non-starters like The Flash. To be fair, there were a couple, such as Blue Beetle and The Marvels, that displayed certain quirky charms that allowed them to stand out from the pack but they too found themselves soundly rejected by the public. Alas, anyone hoping that the tide would turn in the genre’s favor once again will be bummed to learn that the first one out of the gate this year, Madame Web, is almost certainly not going to accomplish that. Of course, based on the mocking response to the trailer that debuted a few months ago and became an extensively memed laughingstock thanks to one particularly tin-eared line of clumsily-written expositional dialogue, the fact that this one doesn’t quite pan out might not be much of a surprise but even the most avid doomsayers may be shocked by how inept this one is.
The film opens in 1973 on a studio set struggling to convince us that it is the jungles of deepest Peru, where intrepid and heavily pregnant scientist Constance Webb (Kerry Bishe) is searching for a rare spider, rumored to have miraculous healing properties. Amazingly, she is able to find one of the spiders but is immediately betrayed by her expedition partner, Ezekiel Sims (Tamar Rahim), who shoots and leaves her for dead before absconding with the arachnid. Constance is found by Las Aranas, a cult of spider people who swing from the treetops, and while they cannot save her life, they allow one of the spiders to bite her so that she can deliver her child before expiring. The story picks up (in the loosest sense of the word) with our introduction to that now-grown child, Cassie (Dakota Johnson), who is now a paramedic with commitment issues born out of her resentment over the loss of her mother and her seemingly inexplicable insistence on going out into the jungle when pregnant.
Things start to get weird one day when, in the middle of a rescue, Cassie undergoes a near-death experience and suddenly develops the ability to see events that will be occurring in the very near-future. Understandably confused and surly at first (though this would appear to be her default mode), she soon discovers that she can indeed act to change the events that she see. After boarding a train to Poughkeepsie (even in comic book movies, these things happen), Cassie has a vision of an unknown man walking into the same car and killing three seemingly random teenage girls—Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Anya Corazon (Isabella Merced) and Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor)—and jumps in to save their lives and spirit them to safety, though in the confusion, she is mistakenly identified as their kidnapper instead of their savior.
The attacker is, of course, Ezekiel, who, in addition to being rich and powerful (though at what, the film never quite says), also has spider-like powers of his own derived from the one that he stole 30 years ago. He is also plagued by visions in the future of a trio of young women in fetishy outfits and spider-like powers smacking him around before killing him. Being far too rich and powerful to let that happen, he contrives to steal top-secret NSA tracking software and hires someone (Zosia Mamet) to scan all the databases, traffic cameras and whatnot in the hopes of getting a trace on his unknown dream girls so that he can murder them before they can kill him.
After getting the girls to safety and convincing them that she is not crazy, she leaves them in the middle of the woods while she goes to check some of her mom’s old papers, discovering that the attacker was her mother’s old colleague. After rescuing the girls once again—tire of waiting for Cassie’s return, they sneak off to a nearby diner and dance on the tabletops to “Toxic” until Ezekiel turns up—Cassie deposits them with her paramedic partner Ben (Adam Scott) and his pregnant wife Mary (Emma Roberts) so that she can zip off to Peru to get to the bottom of things. Will Cassie be able to evade pursuit, turn up in the middle of the Peruvian jungle and find those spider people? If so, will they be able to supply enough information to allow her to find closure with her troubled past and unlock the powers that will help her to defeat Ezekiel? Will she be able to come and go from New York to Peru without a single hiccup despite being wanted for multiple kidnappings? Will the film eventually devolve into a seemingly random array of dippy-looking action sequences that will make you long for the clarity, vision and clean storytelling of Morbius. (I’d tell you but the studio rep warned us not to reveal any spoilers in our reviews, though in hindsight, I can think of many other things that he could of warned us about instead.)
Speaking of Morbius, a phrase I had dearly hoped I would never find the need to invoke, Madame Web is, like that film and the two Venom features, part of Sony’s attempt to maximize the value of their screen rights to Spider-Man by making a spinoff that is vaguely adjacent to that universe. Those movies weren’t very good, of course, but even they begin to seemingly flirt with competence in comparison to this film. Sure, I am not the biggest superhero movie booster but even the most dedicated fans—the ones who might point out that the original Madame Web, as depicted in the comic books, was actually an elderly woman (perhaps part of the same studio thinking that gave us Marisa Tomei as the screen’s first AMILTF)—will be shocked with the cruddiness on display here. The efforts of the four credited screenwriters add up to less than nothing—Cassie’s power to see and alter future events is not especially interesting the first time we see it deployed (at times making the film feel like a TV edit of a lesser Final Destination movie) and do not improve upon repetition, she and her charges are afforded maybe a line or two of clumsy dialogue about their backgrounds in lieu of actual character development and the big bad guy is such an epic fail that if you were to replace him with Wile E. Coyote, the difference would be negligible at best.
Even judged solely on the basis of providing lavish, action-packed spectacle, Madame Web comes up woefully short. Early on, director SJ Clarkson seems to be emulating the flamboyant visual style of Sam Raimi, who directed the initial Spider-Man films back in the day but outside of the desperate attempt to remind us subliminally of other, better Spider-Man-related projects, this just feels like an affectation. Beyond that, the film is plagued with visual effects that run the gamut from shaky to borderline embarrassing, action scenes that are as rudimentary in their conception and execution as can be and a sluggish pace that makes it feel as if it is three times longer than it actually is. Perhaps in recognition of this, the publicity for the film has been trying to suggest that it is more of a thriller than a superhero epic but it proves to be equally inept in that area as well. To make matters worse, it will quickly become apparent to even vaguely attentive viewers that the film must have undergone major surgery at some point in an attempt to salvage it, leading to numerous instances in which it appears as if new lines were looped in later in order to try to paste things together. The whole thing has the cobbled-together feel of a reverse fan-edit, one weirdly designed to accentuate the flaws instead of eliminating them.
Perhaps the most obvious indication that something went terribly awry with this particular project is the central performance from Dakota Johnson. She must have realized early on in the proceedings—though not early enough to bail out of it—that this was going to make those Fifty Shades of Grey boondoggles looks artistically sound by comparison and therefore decided to approach both the film and her performance with tongue planted firmly in cheek, delivering lines with bone-dry, off-beat cadences that make her sound like a combination of Aubrey Plaza at her most disaffected and Christopher Walken at his Walkenest while doing everything in her power to avoid literally rolling her eyes. Some may suggest that she is barely putting in even a token degree of effort here but in her defense, no one else involved with it has either. Besides, she was presumably saving her energies for the infinitely Herculean task of going out to promote the film and make it sound as though she was actually enthusiastic about it. (As anyone who has seen her making the talk show rounds, she clearly failed in that task but her evident indifference/distaste for both the movie and the entire promotional apparatus has led to so many amusing moments that I hope that Sony includes a highlight reel as a special feature on the blu-ray, possibly in lieu of the film itself.)
As I said, the studio rep warned us about giving away spoilers for Madame Web but considering the absolute indifference that the film seems to have towards itself, I have decided to mention two of them here, so those of you who are still inexplicably compelled to see it can skip this last paragraph. The first is that the particular line of clumsy dialogue that launched more memes than you can shake a stick at—“That man is Ezekiel Sims—he was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.”—is no longer in the actual film. The other is the fact that, unlike most other superhero movies in recent years, there are no additional scenes during the end credits teasing further adventures, possibly as a tacit acknowledgement that by the time that making another Madame Web film might seem like a good idea, Dakota Johnson would be old enough to play a more comics-accurate version of the role. This means that as soon as the end credits begin, you can safely leave without missing anything. Then again, you could bail during the trailer reel before it even starts and not miss anything either.