Marvel’s junky spin-off is a tangled mess
Our Spidey senses are starting to tingle again!
Dakota Johnson lazily leads an incompetent attempt to set up a new character, made almost incoherent by last-minute changes
It was an inevitable collapse after a reign of such unwarranted length and unparalleled indulgence, superhero movies totalling eight a year during the 2010s, a lucrative yet tiresome stronghold. There were brief highlights within the flurry but such lazy overreliance left little room for other blockbuster genres to flourish and led studios to scrape barrels, giving us more and more of something we’d ultimately had enough of. Last year saw an overwhelming rejection (The Flash, Shazam 2, The Marvels, Ant-Man 3, Aquaman 2 all underperforming) and now the fallout, the first of the year doubling up as a Powerpoint presentation on what went wrong and how not to fix it.
Developed in 2019, approved in 2020, shot in 2022, and purportedly reshooted last year, Madame Web was intended to expand Marvel and Sony's Spider-Man universe. It was a commercially, if not artistically, sensible choice following the unexpected success of Venom and Into the Spider-Verse in 2018. In a film that desperately tries to pass for something it isn't, an elderly clairvoyant who helped Spider-Man in the comics is suddenly transformed into a teenage paramedic, played by Dakota Johnson, who isn't even aware that Spider-Man exists.
This kind of bewilderment was evident in the trailer released the previous year, which went viral right away due to its absurdly ambiguous tone, complicated storyline, and erotically attractive main actress. Aware of the sea change, Johnson has insisted during press that the film is a stand-alone picture in a stand-alone universe, and as a result, it is now referred to as a gritty suspense thriller in publicity materials.
Years from now, the knotted mess that all of this has created will undoubtedly make for an intriguing oral history, but for now, all we have is an unbelievably long 110-minute head scratcher, a bewildering series of unanswered questions, as everyone concerned fervently and contractually insists that the final product is exactly as intended. Our first warning signal is a sloppy opening set in 1970s Peru that is poorly written and produced, establishing our heroine's ridiculous backstory—which has something to do with both spiders and spider-people.
There is something sickly compelling about how jumbled and utterly incompetent Madame Web is, less as a so-bad-it's-fun Midnight Movie and more as studio film-making in the 2020s at its very worst case study. The script was written by four people, including the film's director, SJ Clarkson. The location is mostly Boston acting as New York, and the lead looks like she would really rather be anywhere else.
The attempt to recast it as a "suspense thriller" ultimately backfires on the movie because, in addition to the fact that there isn't any suspense or thrills in this version, accepting it as something more grounded and unrelated to the heightened superheroics of the world it comes from would make it even more difficult for us to suspend our disbelief throughout.
Nothing about any of it is realistic or grittier. Even though the widely shared viral statement from the trailer is regretfully absent from the film, the movie is just as cheesy and schlocky as the worst of its genre, with shoddy network TV effects, uninteresting action, and awkward and unfunny dialogue. Additionally, I haven't seen some of the most heinous instances of product placement in a long time.
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