“He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.”
Only Dakota Johnson, star of the Fifty Shades trilogy, can deliver a line of dialogue that is a mouthful of exposition. When the infamous line from Madame Web’s first trailer went viral on the internet, it cemented people’s expectations that the film was going to be a failure. While this line of dialogue isn’t spoken in the final film, this is the latest instalment of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, a cynical attempt to create a shared universe, comprising of characters who have debuted in the pages of Spider-Man comics. Although the likes of Venom and the Punisher have managed a life of their own outside of Spidey with comic book runs throughout the decades, most of them have not, including Madame Web.
Following Sony’s previous Marvel productions from the two Venom flicks to Morbius that awkwardly tried to connect as its own universe, Madame Web functions as its own beast, taking place in 2003, a time when we had female-led superhero movies like Catwoman and Elektra. Played by the aforementioned Dakota Johnson, Cassandra Webb, an awkward paramedic in Manhattan who, after an accident, develops psychic abilities as a clairvoyant which allow her to see into the future. When she is forced to confront her past when Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim) is targeting three women, Cassandra becomes the reluctant hero for the trio who will become Spider-people in the future.
Created by Denny O’Neil and John Romita Jr., Madame Web originally appeared as an elderly woman who was presented as a mentor to Spider-Man. With no Peter Parker around – though Adam Scott plays fellow paramedic Ben Parker, whose sister is expecting – Cassandra must be the responsible adult towards Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor) and Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced), each of which have donned the mantle of Spider-Woman in their own way. From the Spider-Verse movies to Spider-Man: No Way Home, these films have shown a fun side to an ensemble of Spider-people, and Madame Web never comes close to reaching that sense of fun.
While there are glimpses to the future alter-egos of the female leads, as well as the “wink-winking” of the Spider-Man mythos, Madame Web tries to function more as a psychological thriller with a woman wrestling with her psychic powers and her initial reluctance to become a hero. Although you can see comparisons with M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, which was a brilliant, grounded deconstruction of the superhero origin story, Madame Web has an identity crisis, in that it can’t decide whether it wants to be a suspense thriller with a supernatural twist or a full-blown superhero origin where the world-building is patchy.
In her directorial film debut, S. J. Clarkson, who co-wrote the screenplay by Claire Parker and the writing team of Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, plays it straight with a tone that isn’t fun or as scary as they hope. With a baffling choice to set the story in the early noughties, Madame Web continues Sony’s trend of recapturing an outdated era of comic book movies, where there is an inherent laziness in how it adapts the source material. You always get the sense that the film dishes out as much exposition as it can throw, and yet not laying enough about the mythos, which could be a sign that the makers are suggesting a sequel in the future.
Centering on a protagonist, who seems reluctant to take part in the action, you can say the same about Johnson, who delivers such a disinterested performance that you wonder why she got involved in the first place. Given the amount of talent involved, from the three other leads to Tahar Rahim, the script rarely gives them much to chew on, with Sydney Sweeney looking awkward and confused and the villain being one of the blandest things to ever grace the screen. Amid the mediocrity, there is one set-piece which takes place in a diner where Britney Spears’ “Toxic” plays in the background, and it is the one time where the cast was having fun and when the film was starting to click.
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