‘Madame Web’ Review
It’s no ‘Morbius’ (derogatory).
WHEN I’M WATCHING COMIC BOOK MOVIES, I have a general rule that has served me well over the years: If, by the end of the film, I cannot adequately explain precisely what powers (and, hopefully, what weaknesses) the heroes and the villains have, the movie has failed on such a fundamental level that something went terribly wrong somewhere in the writing, shooting, or editing of the picture.
By this measure, Madame Web is very much a failure.
The film starts strong, at least in the sense that it starts so off-the-wall goofy that you can’t help but kind of cheer for it. A scientist (Kerry Bishé) is in the Peruvian Amazon searching for a spider whose bites heal; she happens to be very late in pregnancy. A man accompanying her is looking for the same spider in the hopes that it will give him powers. They find the spider, he shoots her, and she is grabbed by a tribe of spider-people who are all dressed in what can only be described as spiderweb-loincloths and they swing her back to a cave like so many spider-Tarzans where they try to save her by letting one of the spiders (which gave them their powers and has healing properties) bite her.
She dies, but the baby lives, and we flash forward to New York City, 2003, when the baby has grown into Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson), ambulance driver extraordinaire. She’s having weird visions that turn out to be glimpses of the future. She can see what happens and her failure to change what happens leads to the death of a friend, demonstrating to her that with great power comes, you know. By film’s end, the visions have somehow transformed into an ability to astral-project herself into multiple places at the same time, which I guess the director and four credited writers threw in there because the film’s final set piece involving the dodging of fireworks and sheet metal seemed kind of lame.
Also seeing glimpses of the future is Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), the man who killed Cassie’s mother all those years ago. In his visions, three spider-women are hunting him, eventually killing him. Why? We have no idea, but neither does he. Who are they? He has no idea, but he has hacked the 2003-era NSA, which provides him 2023-era tracking abilities, and he has aged-down his artistic renderings of his visions, which have allowed the NSA program to track them. Don’t ask questions, just roll with it.
But ask questions we must! Because here we see the second key factor for any serviceable comic book movie: the villain must have a motivation we understand. And I have no idea what Ezekiel’s motivation in this movie is at all, at any point, other than “I don’t want these spider-ladies to kill me.” Which, fair enough, but why do they want to kill him? How has he gotten rich in the intervening decades? Did the spider bite turn him into a genius businessman? Is he a villain, using his powers for ill? Has he become a spider-protector like the spider-Tarzans from earlier, and feels he must kill the spider-women to keep saving the city? No idea, we have no sense of him or his life outside of the very narrow role he plays in connecting Cassie with the teen girls who will grow to be the spider-women.
In short, Madame Web is a bad movie. It could have been an extravagantly goofy bad movie as promised in that opening sequence with the spider-Tarzans. (Venom was also a bad movie, but at least it had the saving grace of Tom Hardy arguing with himself in two different voices like an intoxicated derelict suffering a psychotic break.) Instead, it devolves into the same sort of dark, sloppy CGI mush, with action scenes stitched together in an editing room after the fact rather than composed thoughtfully beforehand, that we’ve seen a million times before.
So it’s bad and boring, in addition to making very little sense. A combination as deadly as any spider bite.