Here’s the thing. No one wants “Madame Web” to be bad. This critic is certainly not rooting for it to fail. I would love to write a surprisingly glowing review on a movie centered on a pretty obscure character not only in the Marvel comic book universe but in the slightly smaller ‘Spider-Man‘ comic book universe. That director S.J. Clarkson and the other four writers with a story or screenwriting credit found a way to make the origin story of Cassandra “Cassie” Web a thrilling and maybe even funny 116 minutes at your local movie theater. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Not only is “Madame Web” a mess of a movie it doesn’t even qualify as a “it’s so bad it’s good” moment of escapist entertainment. It suffers from a much worse fate: it’s utterly forgettable.
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That’s good news for the plethora of wasted talent Clarkson and her producers convinced to make this flick. First and foremost is Dakota Johnson, who is center stage as Cassie, a New York Fire Department paramedic who, when we first meet her, is anti-social and full of appropriate late-stage Gen X angst (it is 2003, mind you). One of her few friends is Ben, a co-worker played by Adam Scott, who is barely hinted at as an ex-boyfriend and a uniformly good guy. Moreover, do the math and he could also conveniently be another Spider hero’s Uncle. But we digress. On a routine call, Cassie gets stuck in an upended car that falls off a bridge into one of New York City’s rivers. Before Ben revives her, she has several premonitions in a confusing world of digital CGi-webs plucked right out of an early ’00s visual effects house. But wait, we’re getting ahead of ourselves, before we ever get to the “contemporary” events we need to endure one of the worst filmed and acted prologues in recent memory.
Seriously, we are not exaggerating. The beginning of the movie is truly that bad.
“Madame Web” really starts in 1973 where, in the jungles of Peru, a very pregnant Constance Webb (Kerry Bishé) is on the hunt for a mythical spider with the ability to modify a human being’s cellular structure. Her guide is Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), an antsy sort who projects his sinister motives so loudly you can hear it in a jungle on the other side of the continent. When Constance joyously returns to camp after capturing one of the powerful arachnids, Sims kills all the faceless participants on the expedition and mortally wounds our heroine. Swooping in from the trees to save her is a mythical tribe of people with super spider abilities. They attempt to save her life with the bite from one of the spiders but are only able to assist her in giving birth to her child before she passes. And, yes, that baby grows up to be Cassie. How does the infant Cassie get back to the States, let alone NYC? Does she have any other family? Who’s her dad? Who cares! This is a movie trying to live off tangential Spider-Man fandom in any way it can. Logic doesn’t matter!
Meanwhile, back in the “present,” Sims, also conveniently in New York, is living off his considerable swath of spider-powers (imagine Spider-Man without the webs, but a poisonous death grip). Life ain’t so great for our slightly greying villain, however. He’s plagued by a vision of three Spider-Women who will hunt him down and kill him. Conveniently, he finds a way to access ground-breaking 00’s facial recognition technology (right out of an early “Bourne” movie) to track these three women down. Assisting him, and clearly not getting paid enough to do it, is Amaria (Zosia Mamet, girl why), a tech genius who realizes these women are actually teenagers and she can find them by tapping into camera systems all over the city. Three young women who are, you guessed it, somehow connected to Cassie.
Coincidentally, our heroine is on the same subway train where Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor), and Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced) are about to be attacked by Sims. Cassie’s future spider-sense (it’s never given a specific name, by the way, nothing is) helps her get the girls out of harm’s way. And, before she knows it, she finds herself responsible for the safety of three young women who either have absent parents or none at all. If “chosen family” was a more common term twenty years ago it would have been uttered out loud and we’re honestly surprised they didn’t use it anyway.
There is a lot more plot to unravel that we won’t spoil here, but you can expect car chases, some appropriate period references (Britney Spears’ “Toxic,” a billboard of Beyonce‘s “Dangerously in Love” album art, a DKNY subway entrance ad), Emma Roberts showing up as a very pregnant member of the Parker family (again, do the math), and a lot of exposition. There’s incredibly bad ADR (dubbing) of Rahim. Oh, and his character wears a black version of the original movie Spider-Man costume and we never know why. Cassie drives a damaged, stolen taxi cab without plates all over the greater NYC metro area without getting pulled over. Cassie goes to Peru and back again over the span of a week and Simms is such a terrible villain he can’t find the girls while she’s gone. And that’s just the tipping point. There is a ton of plot in this almost two-hour movie and it still feels like nothing of consequence is ever happening.
If we can give the filmmakers any appropriate credit, “Madame Web” at least does its best to explain Cassie’s deja-vu-ish, future spider-sense parties in an almost cinematic way (emphasis on “almost”). Jackson and editor Leigh Folsom Boyd do a good job of not overwhelming the audience with too many visual effects in these scenes and making sure they are not over-paced. In other hands, this is where you’d chop the movie up to bring the runtime down, but the filmmakers know if this movie is gonna make any sense the audience is gonna have to understand her powers. It’s not perfect and it’s not groundbreaking, but it’s enough.
Fair warning, this is also not the movie the marketing has likely sold you on. At the beginning of the picture, the audience gets a clear view of Julia, Mattie, and Anya in their future Spider-Woman (or Araña in Anya’s case) identities as they use their powers to take Simms down in his recurring nightmare. It’s a super short sequence. You barely and we mean barely see them again in that manner. In fact, “Madame Web,” for better or maybe worse, isn’t even really a superhero movie. You never hear the name Spider-Woman or even Madame Web uttered by anyone (and Spider-Man? Peter Parker? Who?). Instead, the Sony Pictures release is essentially a supernatural thriller about a woman with precognitive abilities protecting three teenage girls from a spider-powered madman. Another version of this movie might lean into the horror aspect of that scenario with much more compelling results. But, oh, this is not that movie. Not at all. [D+]
“Madame Web” opens in theaters nationwide on February 14.