Someone fetch a spider to bite and send us to the hospital, please.
Yours indeed believes he owes an apology to some other superhero films that came out before, including Suicide Squad (2016) and Morbius. Because somehow, upon watching Madame Web desperately try to untangle its web, I think we’ve seen another contender for one of the worst superhero movies in the genre yet again. It is another inert, clunky superhero dud in a genre perilously trying to crawl out of the grave that studios thrust themselves into in the past two years. All the fun and ambition that powered the genre for the past decade have become obsolete because folks are now trying to bring in the “unknown” characters into the fray thanks to studio mandates and then hire talent that doesn’t seem to understand what to accomplish.
Sony’s Spider-Man Universe is in an execrable space, even worse than how the DC Extended Universe panned out over its ten-year history. Venom, Morbius, and Madame Web intend to do something essential for this franchise: ground the series before it even begins. To be fair, Tom Hardy does give it his all in the Venom features, and audiences don’t seem to mind the budding romance between him and the CGI Venom that would be much more prudent in a better-designed narrative. But, like her onscreen heroine here, Dakota Johnson seems as confounded as we are in another laughably lamentable feature.
The story follows Johnson’s character, Cassie Web, as an awkward paramedic who works alongside Ben (Adam Scott) in the New York City atmosphere. What makes her so special, you might ask? Well, in the hastily-thrown-together prologue in 1973, her mother died during childbirth as she was searching in the Peruvian Amazon for a precious spider to cure her disease. However, her mother’s partner, Ezekiel (Tahar Ramin), betrays her by shooting her and leaving her for dead, only to be rescued by some red-skin spider people and to help give birth to Cassie before she passes away. Cassie, in 2003, has flash-forward visions of the future (pretty sure we saw this in Nicholas Cage’s Next film) and stumbles upon three teenage girls to protect them from Ezekiel, or he will murder them from his personal pre-cognitions of witnessing the girls defeat him in the future (in superhero form). Those girls are Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Mattie (Celeste O’Connor), and Anya (Isabela Merced). After that, we get some transportation skits to the woods or a motel for the girls to stay hidden while Cassie understands her powers to stop Ezekiel. And that’s the story.
No, seriously, this plot affirms a retrograde disaster in terms of pacing and structuring. It operates more on a need-to-know basis, tossing things in with breathless exposition and mechanical characterization. No one seems to be enjoying themselves for the camera, and it’s all perfunctory dialogue as we trudge from one location to the next, no matter how attached the editors are to cutting to vehicle chase scenes every ten minutes. Any attempts to be amusing are mute, and all tension is sucked out in each scene. Ramin’s take on the villain is about as generic as it gets, coupled with poor Adam Scott becoming regulated to a diluted background character (that he was praying for another season of Parks and Recreation).
At the end of the day, did Sony intend for this feature to flop? Because they were trolled enough by the Internet to toss Jared Leto’s take on a Marvel vampire back into the multiplex, only for it to collapse in their faces again. There is a possibility the feature was hacked to pieces and reshot multiple times to the point of no return, but why even pursue with action of releasing it then? It’s probably because studios are rolling the dice for hoping something to click on the IP when audiences can’t withstand another poor product any further from a once-prosperous genre. It seems like a distant memory when Spider-Man: No Way Home could cruise to $1.922 billion as COVID measures were becoming pulled back on, or Aquaman could roll the dice with its ludicrous CGI atmosphere and leg out to $1.152 billion over the winter time. Now, we’re at the point where a superhero movie may not even break even when they continue squandering any chances into putting together something, at the very least, adequate.
Madame Web fails to capitalize on any of its remote possibilities and gets trapped in several webs of its own before it considers dusting them off. One is better off predicting their future and not spending their time witnessing another bland disaster of a product onscreen.
