Final Rating: 2/5
Madame Web, directed by S.J. Clarkson, is a film full of baffling creative choices. The script is lame, the story is confounding, the performances are unenthusiastic, and the action is contrived. And yet, against all odds, the sheer incomprehensibility of Madame Web works more to the movie’s benefit than its detriment. Madame Web isn’t the only failure of the modern superhero-industrial complex, but it may be the most entertaining and interesting one.
In Madame Web, paramedic Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson) discovers that, like her Greek namesake, she is blessed with the gift of prophecy. Initially, Webb sees the future in short bursts randomly: a brief premonition of a bird hitting her window, a vision of a balloon popping. She’ll live through a moment before getting a second chance at it as time skips backwards.
Over time, her premonitions become more focused; even before she learns to control them, her visions lead her to three young women who are being hunted by a man who can walk on walls. Having gained powers, wards, and a villain, Webb sets out to discover the nature of the web that connects them all.
In the Spider-Man comics that inspired Madame Web, the titular madame is an elderly mentor figure who typically serves as a supporting character for the webslinger’s more supernatural stories. She’s no action hero, and her backstory is only ever incidental. In constructing her origin story as a traditional superhero narrative, first-time feature director S.J. Clarkson and her team of writers are fighting an uphill battle.
Webb’s clairvoyance is mostly used to herald impending fight scenes, but it is essentially absent within them. “Fight scenes” is a bit of a generous description at all, as the heroes’ interactions with the film’s villain are relegated almost entirely to scenes of Webb and an assortment of non-superpowered individuals running from a vaguely menacing man in what looks like a cheap Halloween costume. Remarkably, there’s hardly any tension within these chase scenes. Will Webb and her wards escape? Of course they will, there’s still an hour left of the movie.
The main threat to Madame Web is Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), an arbitrarily rich person with a career that’s either mercenary, scientist, or some mixture of both. Sims also has visions of the future, but in his case, it’s a single recurring dream in which he gets beat up and killed by three women in spider-themed spandex. In a bid to change his future, he steals NSA tracking technology and attempts to hunt down the women from his recurring dream and kill them with spider-poison, which he also secretes, just as an aside.
Rahim is embarrassingly bad in the role. He sleepwalks through the movie, barely a physical presence, much less an imposing one. His dialogue is almost entirely dubbed in. It’s unmistakably Rahim’s voice, but it rarely syncs with his actual lip movements. Rahim’s scenes truly beg the question of what happened here behind the scenes? Was the script changed after shooting? Was Rahim’s original audio corrupted somehow? Is the poor ADR a creative choice to represent a villain physically and metaphorically out-of-sync with reality?
Standing against Sims are a trio of high-schoolers who have no idea what’s going on. Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced), and Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor) are all characters who eventually become Spider-Woman in the comics, and will, supposedly, adopt similar mantles in Sony’s universe.
They’re just normal high-schoolers here, though, and not particularly interesting ones. Within Madame Web, they almost exclusively serve as a contrivance to get Webb into confrontations with Sims. The writing team doesn’t really seem to know what to do with them, which is especially evident during a scene only a few minutes after their introduction, in which Webb leaves them in a forest in the middle of New Jersey and drives back to New York in a stolen car. This is Madame Web, after all, not Spider-Women.
Which brings us to Madame Web herself. Johnson inhabits Webb with all the enthusiasm of an elementary schooler serving detention. If there’s an aspect of this film to be taken seriously, she clearly wasn’t interested. Johnson delivers her lines devoid of any emotion, and her expressions range from mild confusion to vague disinterest. Johnson’s performance is so hostile towards the very film she is starring in, that it often distracts from the movie’s other deficiencies.
At times, the film feels less like an adaptation of a comic book than a disguised commentary on the suffocating nature of inconceivably expensive, disposable shlockbusters. Johnson isn’t interested in Madame Web, and the other creatives involved in the film don’t seem to have been either. But, like Webb’s predictions, the Sony Spider-Man-Without-Spider-Man movies are an inevitability.
Aspects of the filmmaking of Madame Web are competent. The cinematography isn’t particularly offensive, and while the movie gets more mileage than it ought to out of an unsightly orange tint, it never quite crosses the line into “ugly.” Visual motifs of spider-webs are cleverly inserted into shot compositions. The déjà vu nature of Webb’s visions is consistent and effective at conveying the confusion it causes for the character.
Despite some fleeting displays of filmmaking talent, Madame Web often puts its most baffling creative choices front and centre. Sims’ supervillain suit is cheap, black spandex that looks like how someone would draw Spider-Man to avoid copyright infringement. Even with the overreliance on ADR for his character, Sims never speaks while in the suit. While it’s clear that Sims in costume and Sims out of costume are the same character, the two states never feel meaningfully connected.
During confrontations, the sets are frustratingly cluttered, making the film’s few action scenes overwhelming to follow. When characters are just standing around talking, though, the sets are almost too open. It’s as if the characters exist in a world that’s empty except when it tries to kill them.
But even at its worst, Madame Web is fascinating. The choices are almost uniformly bad, but in interesting ways that inspire more–if not necessarily deeper–reflection. Why would Rahim, Sweeney, and Johnson–all of whom have delivered great performances in the past–play their characters like this? Spider-Man and his supporting cast have such a wealth of exciting costumes, which have been translated to slick-looking cinematic adaptations several times already–so why does every costume in this movie look like it came from Spirit Halloween?
If anything, the film’s greatest weakness isn’t any one of its multitude of obvious flaws. It’s the simple fact that it’s hard to watch something fail for a full two hours.
The Blu-Ray comes with three behind-the-scenes featurettes. Like many behind-the-scenes interviews, these are littered with platitudes. Director Clarkson talks about how she’s always been a fan of Johnson, Johnson talks about how she was drawn to the role because she likes Marvel movies, the producers talk about how Madame Web is different from other superhero movies because it’s “real” and “grounded.” Johnson even gets this great quote: “there’s something powerful about a group of women, and when you make them superheroes, it’s undeniable.”
Buried between the fluff, however, is the implication of a completely different movie. Each of the women playing a high-schooler in the film speaks at length about their superhero personas and their abilities, none of which are in Madame Web for more than a few moments. Rahim mentions an entire backstory for the villain which is completely absent from the film. The actors are clearly passionate about these aspects of their characters, or at least they wouldn’t have invented them whole cloth for an interview.
It’s clear that somewhere in the process of making Madame Web, something changed. What happened to this movie? The featurettes don’t provide an explicit answer, but producer Adam Merims does offer this excellent quote: “I always say if you’re going to do a superhero story, do an origin story.”
But not an origin story for any of the interesting characters, apparently.
Thank you to So.da for the Blue-Ray of the film. Madame Web is available for purchase wherever you get movies!
