'Madame Web' fails audiences
Unlike Madame Web, I don’t have the power to see the future, but it didn’t take any foresight to guess that her new movie was going to be a disaster. Still, Director S. J. Clarkson (“Jessica Jones”) surprised me. “Madame Web” was far worse than I ever could have predicted.
The story follows Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson), an EMT gifted with visions of the future, as she tries to stop Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), an evil Spider-Man knockoff who shot Cassandra’s mom, from killing three teenage girls who he dreams will gain super powers and murder him.
From the beginning, Cassandra is a hero, saving lives as an EMT well before she gains her powers — an interesting and unconventional start for a superhero origin story; however, as soon as she gains her powers, she stops being helpful and constantly tries to shirk responsibility and abandon the teenagers that Sims is trying to kill.
This lazy character regression allows Clarkson to return to familiar Spider-Man story beats with Cassandra learning to take responsibility and be a hero, but Clarkson sacrifices the opportunity to do something fresh with this story.
Madame Web’s future-sight is another missed opportunity, often ignored in favor of poor imitations of “Fast and Furious” action sequences. For example, Cassandra steals a car and drives it through a building to smash into Sims. Twice. Not once does she do anything half as exciting with her powers of foresight.
One might hope the super-heroic antics of the other three spider-women shown in trailers would make up for missed opportunities with the titular character.
Unfortunately, none of the girls who Sims hunts have powers, and the three teens only don spider outfits in Sims’ dreams and a final scene that should have been a post-credits tease. All three are archetypal damsels in distress for Cassandra to save.
Mattie Franklin is an insufferable brat (Celeste O’Connor). Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced) is a nerd, utterly lacking in personality. Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney) rounds out the trio as an infantilized child, carrying a teddy bear and wearing a schoolgirl outfit.
Strangely, the movie still manages to sexualize Julia as she dances on a table for a bunch of jocks with her shirt tied into a crop top. 26-year-old Sweeney never looks comfortable in this role, and I never felt comfortable watching her.
Despite surface level differences, Clarkson never does anything unique with the teens. They all constantly repeat the same tired motions in turn, be it getting beaten by Sims, explaining how they lost their parents or learning CPR.
Dialogue is by far the worst part of the movie. It is genuinely impressive how Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, who co-wrote “Morbius,” cooked up a script in which not a single sentence sounds like it would be said by a human being.
Every character spews out numerous information dumps that desperately try to justify the convoluted plot. Rahim’s Sims is the worst offender, constantly reminding the audience of his nightmares with pretentious nonsense like “Every day that goes by, my appointment with death grows closer,” or “It’s not a dream. I’m gonna be murdered one day.”
Worse still, most of Rahim’s lines clearly don’t align with what his mouth is saying. The atrocious dubbing combined with the fact that most of the characters insist on calling him “ceiling guy” undercut any intimidation loud music and dark lighting might give Sims.
Even the most basic care in creating a movie is absent.
Continuity editing is ignored, as characters seemingly teleport between shots or change from one trashy costume to another instantaneously. The movie’s resolution relies heavily on a ridiculous deus ex machina, avoiding a climactic battle in a superhero movie already lacking in action.
For a movie so distinctly connected to Peter Parker’s Spider-Man, Clarkson seems embarrassed to bring him up. His iconic mantra is remixed to “when you take on the responsibility, great power will come.”
Mary Parker (Emma Roberts), pregnant with a child that is never confirmed to be Peter, and her brother, soon-to-be-uncle Ben (Adam Scott) have minor roles, but even at Mary’s baby shower, she coyly avoids revealing the baby’s name.
One has to wonder why this was even a Marvel movie, when Madame Web herself is so drastically changed from her blind and paralyzed comic-book counterpart.
“Madame Web” is a tangled mess that fails to weave together into something more than the sum of its miserable parts. It is baffling that this was the version of the movie that Sony considered fit for release after months of extensive reshoots and rewrites.
It boggles the mind to imagine what “Madame Web” must have been like before so that the movie I saw in theaters was considered an improvement.
