When I saw that
MADAME WEB had dropped on Netflix, I got way too excited. As much as I dislike rubberneckers, I just had to experience this train wreck of a film for myself. I say this as a superhero nerd who—like all of you—is suffering superhero movie fatigue. But this is the first time that
THE MOVIE ITSELF exhibits symptoms of said malady, to the point of almost completely excising superheroics in favor of a lot of scenes of running away from things.
MADAME WEB is one of Sony’s flailing attempts to milk their rights to the Spider-Man universe (following two Venom films and MORBIUS, along with the upcoming KRAVEN THE HUNTER), loosely basing this film on a handful of Marvel Comics characters, including the titular Cassandra Webb. In the comics, Madame Web is an old lady, but of course, the movie has to make her an attractive young woman (played by Dakota Johnson). Stir in three different teenage girls who will one day become their own distinct Spider-Woman (all before Peter Parker becomes Spider-Man, apparently), an obscure Spidey villain, and a young Uncle Ben as a paramedic, and you’ve got box office gold! Er, lead.
What little plot exists here (after much reported rewriting) is serviceable, I guess, but the whole endeavor is so rote, so weighed down with movie clichés (the overly art-directed journal, the pristine, un-gooey newborn baby, distracting product placement, the sassy black girl who’s flippant in the face of danger, to name a few), shitty CGI, and cardboard performances that absolutely nothing sticks. That’s a spider metaphor, and about as clever as anything in the movie.
If MADAME WEB can have any kind of legacy, perhaps it’s that no movie has ever better laid bare the fact that filmmaking is, to the bulk of its participants both in front of and behind the camera, just a job. Not every actor gives a shit about the story or has any connection to the character (Dakota Johnson notoriously couldn’t name one recent SPIDER-MAN movie, and may have thought her film was part of the “actual” MCU). And that’s fine. Nobody’s pretending that MADAME WEB is art. But it fails even as product (despite the constant presence of Pepsi imagery).
MADAME WEB is just lazy. It’s another movie with no opening credits (the title drops in the midst of a “Marvel” production logo that includes not one recognizable character, and even a full card at the end flashes for a half a second, as if the film is embarrassed by itself), that drops pop culture references (shitty ones at that) to wake the audience up and remind them that this is a period piece (it’s set in 2003, despite a ton of anachronisms), that tries to be clever by slightly altering familiar tag lines (“When you take on the responsibility, great power will come” … no, seriously), that reuses visual gags such as broken windows that splinter like spider webs so Dakota Johnson can pose behind them.
It’s kind of amazing to me to think that there was a time not so long ago that as a card-carrying fanboy, I felt obligated to not just see, but OWN every superhero movie that was produced, even ones I didn’t like (eg, BATMAN & ROBIN and DAREDEVIL). I think I realized that endeavor was not only pointless, but unsustainable by the time Andrew Garfield’s THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN came out in 2012. But I never dreamed that the day would come where there’d be SO MUCH OF THIS STUFF that not only would I not want to see all of it, but I’d wish it would stop. Or at the very least, stop being squirted out with all the creative care of a chicken McNugget.
