MADAME WEB

Where to start…

The 2020’s so far have produced some truly awful superhero films, but The Sony Spider-Man Universe (SSU) - The only Spider-Man Universe to date to not feature Spider-Man - have produced some of the worst.

The Venom films are bland and uninspired, and Morbius was so utterly forgettable and nonsensical I can barely remember what happened in it.

So, I didn’t have huge expectations going in. Honestly, I would have settled for adequacy. Some dumb fun to wile away a couple of hours.  

But, while Madame Web manages to vault the incredibly low bar that Morbius set, it is a film in which almost nothing works.

Madame Web herself is a character that few casual comic book fans will have heard of, and her origin story is not likely to be one that entices people into her world. We first meet Madame Web (or Cassie Webb as we are introduced to her) as an EMT who starts to have startling visions of the near future.

As the film progresses she finds herself involved in a murderous plot, rescuing three teenage girls from being killed by someone with a hitherto unknown link to her families past.

Johnson plays Cassie with bizarre casualness. Even in the moments where she is in mortal danger she never manages to look more than mildly inconvenienced by what is happening around her. 

She strolls through the film, and it’s emotional beats, like a bystander rather than someone actively involved in proceedings.

The film portrays Cassie as a reluctant hero, but it seems to me more that Johnson is a reluctant actor. Watch some clips of her press tour for Madame Web. She can barely bring herself to talk about it. 

She has commented that the script changed a lot after she signed on, and perhaps this is part of it, but she has never once given the impression that she is in any way enthused by the character or the film.

She does not appear to want to be there, and this reflects in her performance. 

But as unconvincing as she is as a superhero, she is even less convincing as an EMT. Not that this is particularly her fault. The screenwriters and directors seem to have done less than the bare minimum research into this and it really shows.

Tahar Rahim, who was so good in 2021’s The Mauritanian, gives one of the worst supervillain performances I’ve seen. He’s clearly been told to dial the drama and the evil up to 11, but his Ezekiel Sims would feel more at home in a year 8 drama workshop than in a major Hollywood release. He is wooden, uncharismatic, and not a fun screen presence.  

Granted he is not helped by horrendous ADR. Rahim sounds like he recorded his dialogue months later, without a version of the film in front of him. At one point the line is clearly dubbed as the words he’s saying don’t match the movements of his lips; The fact that this was left in, in the form that it is, pointing to a laziness and indifference to quality behind the camera.

Neither Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O’Connor or Isabela Merced come across as convincing teenagers, and Adam Scott sleepwalks through as Ben Parker (another hint towards a Spider-Man reveal that will likely never come).

And, ultimately, responsibility for this must come down to the director. S. J. Clarkson fails to get a good performance out of any of her actors. Many of whom have done good work elsewhere. She doesn’t seem to understand the characters or her cast.

It naturally doesn’t help, however, that the script is woeful (who would have thought it from the writers of Morbius, Gods of Egypt and Dracula Untold). 

The plot is paper thin, its characters underwritten, and the emotional climaxes underserved. 

It has dialogue that may have looked good on paper but on screen never manages to resemble anything that has ever come out of a human face. Dialogue that was mocked so heavily when the trailers were released that some of it has been removed from the final film. Dialogue that is so dumb that even in its most dramatic moments had people laughing in the screening I attended.

Even in the moments where Madame Web succeeds in what it’s trying to do, it still manages to be unenjoyable. There are moments where Cassie is seeing the future happening around her , and these are genuinely disorienting. The audience feels in this moment what Cassie is feeling. This is obviously by design and props to the film makers for actually achieving what they wanted.

But it’s not fun. In the same way that feeling disoriented after a massive head trauma isn’t fun. 

It is potentially the one part of the film that looks good, but it's not fun.

And speaking of looking good, Madame Web is a film which, mostly, does not. Its CGI looks poor from start to finish, and some of its set design - in particular the Peruvian cave that Cassie hops on a plane to - looks cheap; More like a set from Jungle Run than a major studio film.

And look, I realise that I'm the problem here. It’s me. I’m the problem, it’s me.

Because Sonys Spider-Man universe has given me every possible warning that this would be terrible.

Insipid trailers. A lead actor that can barely muster enthusiasm for it. And a roster of films which, up til now have been some of the weakest superhero entries of the decade.

And still I went to see it.

I'm the problem. Sony have been remarkably honest about the lack of quality on show. 

Yet they soldier on. And so too do I. Onto the next. Hoping beyond hope that this franchise becomes good. Hoping that the hours I’ve invested into the SSU so far will be rewarded.

Despite all of this I am, ever the hopeless optimist, still looking forward to Kraven the Hunter (currently due in August). 

So be prepared for my inevitably disappointed review of that this summer.

Madame Web though… I went in hoping for adequacy, but it failed to meet that incredibly low bar. In a time of disappointing superhero movies it has to go down as one of the worst. A film which, from top to bottom, fails. Where everybody involved, fails. 

No doubt the character will be back, as the SSU limps towards an inevitable cross-over movie that nobody outside of Sony wants, but you don’t need to see this.