I didn’t go into Madame Web blind. I saw the Rotten Tomatoes score. The best reviews I saw for the movie said it was unintentionally hilarious. There was talk of bad ADR, horrible acting, and a whole host of other problems. Heck, at least one article I saw noted star Dakota Johnson didn’t seem all that psyched about the movie while she was out promoting it. In fact, my AMC app wasn’t loading my ticket right when I got to the theater like even the app knew the movie sucked and I shouldn’t go. But as I joked to the young woman behind the counter, I hate myself. If nothing else, I didn’t actually pay anything since it was one of my weekly passes for being a Stubbs A-Lister.
Besides, I suspected this one was going to be bad as soon as I heard about it because, well…someone thought a minor Spider-Man supporting character like Madame Web could carry a movie for some stupid reason. But I will be fair. Maybe it wasn’t that bad.
Or it was that bad. This movie is really, really bad, and without the benefit of a “so bad it’s good” kinda thing going on. Oh well, let me try to handle the review now.
After a brief prologue explains how a pregnant scientist was killed by the man she thought was protecting her expedition to find a rare spider in the Amazon Rain Forest, the movie flashes forward thirty years to 2003 where paramedic Cassandra Web (Johnson) probably should be in another line of work given how she feels about, oh, everybody. Or I think she should since Johnson, who would probably acquit herself just fine in a supporting role for an indie movie, just seems kinda flat and bored for the entire movie, and the one person she even seems to like at all is her partner Ben (Adam Scott, the only actor who might be trying at all and he ain’t doin’ that much), and yes, though the movie never outright says it, he is the uncle to a future superhero wallcrawler who, like many other highly recognizable characters in the movie from the Spider-verse, is hinted at strongly but never really identified. Anyway, a near-death experience unlocks the ability for Cassandra to see the future, and she eventually learns she can change it.
That comes in handy later when Ezekiel Simms (Tahar Rahim), the very man who shot and killed Cassandra’s mother and stole the rare spider, has some rather spider-ish powers of his own. He’s been having nightly visions of a trio of Spider-Women who will kill him in the future, and he wants to put a stop to that apparently because he never realized that maybe attacking the three of them will give them the motive to take him down later. As it is, Cassandra is on the train just before Simms can murder Mattie (Celeste O’Connor), Anya (Isabela Merced), and Julia (Sydney Sweeney), and Cassandra’s timely intervention gets the girls out of there before…you know, I think you know where the rest of the movie goes from there.
So yeah, this was bad. Rahim’s lines all sound dubbed over with really bad ADR, such that he looks like a character in a bad martial arts movie with equally bad dubbing. The three girls are mostly interchangeable. Johnson seems bored. And for the life of me, I am not 100% sure someone with so-so clairvoyance can make for a compelling lead character in a superhero movie. If anything, Madame Web seems to be trying to get by on just a bunch of Spider-Man connections and…I don’t know what. Johnson is not a good choice to lead a movie like this one, and there are these flashes at times that probably won’t do anyone prone to epileptic seizures any favors. What isn’t bad is cliched, and that isn’t any better.
You know, I came down a little hard on Argyle two weeks ago. I gave that movie a D despite a few moments that genuinely worked for me. Like a couple other movies I’ve seen this month, the movie started off OK before falling apart. But Madame Web really doesn’t have much of anything worth recommending to it. Nothing about this movie works. I suppose it could work with a truly talented director and a star with the right mindset, but that isn’t on display here. About the only other thing worth noting at this point is, because I get a free weekly pass, I saw this one in the IMAX screening room, and I think there were more people in that room when I saw the second Shazam! movie there last year. But unlike other bad-to-mediocre superhero movies of the past couple years, there’s nothing really to recommend about Madame Web. Black Adam as dull but probably would have been a much better movie if it came out fifteen or so years earlier. The second Aquaman movie was dumb, but I sure was entertained during it because it was all kinds of gonzo nuts. And the third Ant-Man movie still had a couple genuinely compelling performances. Madame Web is just a movie that at best is looking for a reason to exist and just can’t find it.
Grade: F
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