Madame Web is an $80m (£63m) film with the quality of an unlicensed superhero painted on the side of a carnival ride. It’s desperate and seems embarrassed of itself, the pained shrug of a creative team ordered by Sony executives to keep the wheels turning in their Spider-Man-adjacent universe, all while the actual Spider-Man is out on loan to Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Although it’s never clarified, Madame Web is presumably meant to exist in the world of Morbius and Venom – where it’s heavily implied a Spider-Man exists, possibly Tom Holland’s, but everyone is legally barred from mentioning it. The film is set in 2003. There is an Uncle Ben (Adam Scott), whose sister (Emma Roberts) is about to give birth to a boy, whose name she knows but physically cannot utter, as if cursed by an ancient witch. Ben is co-workers with a paramedic named Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson), whose mother was shot dead in the Amazon while pregnant with her. There’s the line, “When you take on the responsibility, great power will come” – a garbled take on Spider-Man’s famous catchphrase, made now to sound like a translation app gone awry.
The film’s script was partially co-written by Morbius’s Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, who hit copy and paste on their superhero colonising their powers from the jungles of the Americas. Cassie’s mother was on the trail of a rare Peruvian spider whose venom can “supercharge their cellular structure”. Her security guard Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim) shoots her dead and steals it to harness its powers, leading him to nightly visions of his future demise at the hands of three Spider-Women – later a trio of unsupervised teenagers, Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor) and Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced), who he’s determined to track down and kill. After a near-death experience, Cassie starts to experience premonitions that eventually land her as the disgruntled caretaker of the girls.
In the comic books, Madame Web is an elderly woman and clairvoyant aid to Spider-Man. The film has absolutely no idea what to do, visually, with that kind of power set, so Cassie can either yell at people to move out of the way or hit them with a car. She spends the film switching between both options. The film is obstinate in its internal logic. Cassie’s first port of call after witnessing the future is to visit her optometrist. When she rescues these teen girls, she promptly dumps them in the middle of the woods and drives off, all because she wants to double-check something back at her apartment. Madame Web makes time for Cassie to conduct a CPR demonstration for her new wards, but doesn’t bother to explain how Ezekiel got his hands on an evil Spider-Man suit more than a decade before Spider-Man existed.
The infamous bit of dialogue from the trailer that promptly went viral – “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders just before she died” – doesn’t actually feature in the finished product. But there’s plenty of opportunity for Johnson, who delivers every line like she’s trying to catch Ellen DeGeneres in a lie, to say equally bizarre things. “I hope the spiders were worth it, mom,” she says at one point. “Obviously it was bad… she died,” she sighs during another.
Director SJ Clarkson, who makes her transition here from television, has a tendency to zoom in dramatically on actors’ faces during dialogue scenes. It’s a trick usually deployed in reality TV to spice up banal conversations. But Madame Web is fiction and has seemingly passed on the opportunity to make itself exciting – instead offering a two-hour prelude to a 30-second trailer for a sequel that will never happen. Ah, well. On to the next Sony project, August’s heavily delayed Aaron Taylor-Johnson vehicle Kraven the Hunter. Let’s see if that one can make a lick of sense.
Dir: SJ Clarkson. Starring: Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O’Connor, Isabela Merced, Tahar Rahim, Mike Epps, Emma Roberts, Adam Scott. 12A, 116 minutes
‘Madame Web’ is in cinemas
