Sony Pictures. 2024. Superhero adventure. 116 min.
Grade: 1 out of 4
Since Sony began loaning out Spider-Man to Marvel Studios in 2015, they’ve released four superhero films that don’t involve Spider-Man but rather characters who are connected to him, which has been satisfying in the same way that seeing Elvis Presley’s backing band perform without Elvis is satisfying. All four films—Venom, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Morbius and now Madame Web—have two things in common; they are all terrible and Spider-Man is the most influential character in a film in which he does not appear. Not only are the four women who topline Madame Web (which Sony is calling a “psychological thriller”) Spider-People in training, but one character is Spider-Man’s future uncle Ben (Adam Scott), and that newborn baby is certainly Peter Parker. Someone even puts a spin on Spider-Man’s signature proverb by telling our lead heroine “when you take on the responsibility, great power will come.” It all points to the Sony’s increasingly desperate assumption that even the wispiest side mention of the web spinner will make us think its garbage films are connected to Marvel Studios’ much more accomplished Spider-Output. But Madame Web, with its eye-rolling dialogue, miscast lead, and dime store psychology, is more proof that Sony’s bandwagon attempt to cobble together a cinematic universe strictly for the benefit of its quarterly earnings reports has been dead since day one.
Screenwriters Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, whose work on 2022’s Morbius was so bad that Sony naturally rehired them to co-write Madame Web, try to finagle their way around the “where is Spider-Man?” problem by setting the majority of the film in 2003, years before the Tom Holland version of Spider-Man makes his appearance. Our guide through this convoluted mess of Britney Spears references and bargain basement IP is Dakota Johnson, who somnambulates her way through a role she is simply not right for. She brings her decidedly non-heroic chill vibe to Cassie Webb, a New York City paramedic whose spider-induced clairvoyant powers are activated when she falls into the East River trying to rescue a motorist. Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O’Connor, and Isabela Merced play teens who require Cassie’s protection from the villain du jour before fulfilling their destiny as various incarnations of Spider-Woman. At least we think that’s what happens because of all the missteps in director S. J. Clarkson’s feature debut, the most bizarre is that neither Sweeney, O’Connor nor Merced are seen in costume, except for a handful of brief moments half-obscured by special effects. This is strictly a street clothes affair, the origin story of an origin story, ostensibly allowing Clarkson to focus on its central girl power quartet.
Unfortunately, getting these four disparate women together in a plausible fashion is not much of a concern; the movie confronts its storytelling obstacles with varying levels of confusing solutions and just plain nonsense. This is critically the case with the movie’s generic villain, Ezekiel Sims, played by French actor Tahar Rahim (A Prophet) in a performance that looks pieced together by editor Leigh Folsom Boyd to mitigate disaster and hide his ADR’d dialogue. Sims sets the story in motion twice; first during a prologue set in the Peruvian Amazon in 1973 when he double-crosses Constance (Kerry Bishé), a scientist pregnant with Cassie and searching for a rare spider with venom that can cure diseases because, you know, “peptides.” Thirty years later, Sims, having stolen the spider and used it to gain a bunch of ill-defined superpowers, experiences recurring nightmares of his own murder at the hands of three female superheroes. So he decides to kill them before they kill him, which leads to numerous scenes in his dimly-lit, big money penthouse where Zosia Mamet sits in front of a bank of computers of the kind you only see in movies, ones that can find any piece of information about anyone anywhere in two seconds. The fact that Sims is such an incompetent bad guy that, even with superpowers and the highest of high-tech surveillance, he can’t find and dispatch three teenage girls makes him one of the least menacing villains ever to don a supervillain costume, which, in this case, is a down-market version of Spider-Man’s spandex duds.
Of course, these aren’t just teenage girls nor are they just future superheroes. They’re three characters with very little chemistry and saddled with banal dialogue in dire need of an age-authentic punch up. They‘re also manufactured to appeal to all demographics and given unexplored parental issues that connect with Cassie’s mommy problems. The white, Lolita-wardrobed Julia (Sweeney) has a mother living in a psych ward, the Hispanic father of Anya (Merced) was deported, and the Black skateboarder Mattie (O’Connor), whose preferred method of communication is a middle finger, has absentee parents who may or may not return from their trip to China. It’s up to Cassie then to protect the girls from Sims and be their surrogate parent, something this loner who “hates family stuff” and prefers staying home watching American Idol is loath to do. Soon, she’ll be teaching them the fine art of CPR which doubles as a bonding exercise and a talent that’ll come in handy later.
Clarkson, whose credits include Netflix’s Marvel show, Jessica Jones, delivers murky battle scenes that take place at night presumably to hide bad effects work. She unleashes her to-go move of flipping the camera 180 degrees to mimic Sims’ acrobatic fighting style so often she must think she’s reinvented Bullet Time from The Matrix. And more than once, a fight features Cassie stopping Sims by plowing a vehicle into him, as if “my superpower is hitting people with vehicles” is enough to gain her entry into the Avengers. The climactic battle between Sims and all four women atop the giant Pepsi-Cola sign in Queens is, aside from vulgar product placement, an all-time laugher. It’s a comical and incoherent dump of explosions, noise, and dialogue set (I am not making this up) at an abandoned fireworks factory, which is about as apt a metaphor for the current state of the superhero genre as you’ll find.
Although no accident of timing could render Madame Web anything but awful, its release at this precarious moment only further advances the argument that Sony, Warner Bros, and Disney have killed their superheroic golden goose by force-feeding us bad product under the assumption that we’ll love anything pulled from their respective trash bins of IP. Then again, if the inevitable financial failure of Madame Web motivates Sony to take a cue from its Oscar-winning Spider-Verse animated gems and give us live action superhero films with the same level of creativity, surprise and energy, they could do something Cassie, Julia, Anya, and Mattie couldn’t; make the world—or at least the rapidly diminishing part of the world with any interest in superhero cinema—a better place.