After the massive joke that Morbius was, expectations are low for Sony’s non-Spider-Man Marvel movies. While recent entries in the once dominant series have fallen flat, chances are you won’t think twice about Madame Web which cements Sony as B-grade brethren to Disney’s star events. If there’s one good thing about having rock bottom expectations, it’s that they can turn a pretty average movie into a nice surprise. So, while Madame Web is nothing special, but can be surprisingly fun.
Another surprise is that S.J. Clarkson’s film acts as more of a horror-thriller like Bird Box or Final Destination than a superhero movie. Madame Web starts with a flashback: Constance (Kerry Bishé) captures a mythical spider with miraculous properties, but she’s betrayed by her bodyguard Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim) and she dies giving birth to Cassie Webb. Flashforward to the early 2000s, and Cassie (Dakota Johnson) is an awkward paramedic who gets into an accident on the job and starts having fractured visions. When she realises that she’s seeing the future where three girls (Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O’Connor, Isabela Merced) are about to be killed by Ezekiel Sims, she steps in to save them. When she does, she gets more than she bargained for and has to look after the three teens while figuring out what is going on.
If the filmmakers were allowed to go full throttle with the idea of subverting the superhero genre, then Madame Web could have become a real head-turner. Instead, the film feels compromised by a studio vision that’s stuck to the trappings of the superhero genre. While the marketing suggested a hero-focused affair, the end result sees Sydney Sweeney as Spider-woman for a brief moment, all of which we see in the trailer. The truth is, this is a superhero-lite film, with one super villain and a little bit of a sixth sense.
What works in Madame Web is the thriller aspect, which is surprisingly tense. Through her visions of the future, Cassie sees how people will die, leaving her with only moments to figure out how to save them. She doesn’t have super strength, can’t climb on walls, and certainly doesn’t shoot webs from her wrists: she simply sees into the future. Sometimes she doesn’t even save them in time.
Dakota Johnson has welcome chemistry with the three teens she works to save. That chemistry becomes crucial to how well Madame Web can work, as the films themes hang off it, as it explores themes of found family, women banding together against abusive men, and even some confronting moments about trauma. Elsewhere, Adam Scott (as Ben Parker) is impressive as the villain of the piece.
Madame Web is an eerily quiet film too, with minimal music or sound effects. One scene at a baby shower has the room going deadly quiet, with a balloon popping as a jump scare. There’s corny audio dubbing over half of Tahar Rahim’s lines, who either can’t act, or had his performance butchered in the final cut. The editing makes action scenes unintelligible, while they decided there was a need for repeat flashbacks to Cassie’s mother, just in case we forgot.
Despite what Madame Web has going for it, the tug of war between the studio and the creators has landed it halfway between good and bad. It’s a part-spider, part-woman, part-thriller, part-superhero film mixed together, it doesn’t all add up, leading it to become exactly what you expected it to be: a choppy B-movie.
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Director: S.J. Clarkson
Cast: Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced
Writers: Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, Claire Parker, S.J. Clarkson, (based on a story by Kerem Sanga, Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless)
