The short version about MADAM WEB is this. No. Just no. Seriously. No.
The long version is this. After spending 1 hour and 57 minutes with MADAME WEB, the word that floats to mind is insipid. Written by a committee, and showing all that is wrong with that approach, it flouts any sense of logic, internal or other, while delivering an origin story that requires no more than one-quarter of that running time. Plot holes abound, the performances are uneven, and the dialogue, even the egregious expositions, is irritatingly cloying and oddly repetitive rather than informative. For me as a reviewer, the first clue that there might be something amiss was when we were ushered into the smallest theater at our local multiplex for the press screening. It’s as though they didn’t want us to get a good gander at anything, even the special effects, some of which, I must say, were pretty interesting. Confusing as far as what they were trying to convey about the nature of time and reality, but interesting.
The requisite intro as prequel finds us in the Peruvian Amazon, where a plucky, and very pregnant, arachnologist (Kerry Bishé), is searching for a rare spider whose venom can cure a plethora of diseases. Actually, it’s the peptides in the venom, and points for using scientific terminology.
But I digress.
She finds the spider and the nefarious plot her travelling companion (Tahar Rahim) has hatched at the same time, leaving the baby an orphan despite a ritual involving shamans and the very spider she has captured. There’s more than peptides at work here. The spider’s bite confers superhuman speed, strength, and the ability to see the future. It also confers the ability to crawl up walls, though how, why, and to whom is murky.
Fast forward thirty years or so to 2003, and that baby, Cassie Web (Dakota Johnson), has grown up to be an EMT with exceptional driving skills and a sardonic sense of humor. She also has the makings of a seer (hence the full name of Cassandra) and it all has to do with that rare spider her mother tracked down (hence Web). It’s the Marvel Universe. Names are going to be self-referential. Further hence, Cassie’s EMT partner is named Ben Parker (Adam Scott). If you know, you know.
Still smarting from having been cheated of a mother, Cassie has become a loner despite Ben’s cajoling her into being more sociable, and the obvious esteem in which her colleagues hold her. When Cassie has a near-death experience, her carefully ordered world falls apart when she begins having déjà vu experiences that predict some very bad things. Science fails to explain why this is happening, but eventually Cassie, being a smart cookie, figures out that not only can she see the future, she can change it. And that future involves three teenage girls whose paths have crossed hers, and that traveling companion of her mother’s, Ezekiel Sims, now wildly wealthy and keeping one of those rare spiders in his extravagant Manhattan apartment while enjoying the superpowers it has given him. But he is not content with this posh life. No, as he tells a stranger (Jill Hennessey) he picks up at the opera, he is troubled nightly by dreams in which he is killed by three young women, whose faces haunt him. No slouch, he’s stolen the then-nascent facial recognition technology from the government, and hired a tech whiz (Zosia Mamet), to track down those women so that he can kill them. Never mind they are just teenagers now.
It quickly descends into general silliness, with Cassie driving a stolen cab in mid-town and not getting stopped; gathering the three teenagers emotionally fragile Julia (Sydney Sweeney), fiercely independent mathlete Anya (Isabela Merced), and skateboarding firebrand Mattie (Celeste O’Connor) and not being picked up on the kidnapping charge leveled at her; and somehow making a pilgrimage to Peru while being sought by the authorities here in the United States. The action is just so much killing time between showdowns with Ezekiel (there are many of them both actual and putative) during which Cassie returns to the scene of one of her crimes with no consequences, and we never do learn why Ezekiel prefers to go about barefoot (except when he’s sporting a Spiderman costume).
Johnson seems out of her depth when essaying strong emotions, or engaging in superheroine derring-do, but credit is due for the way she handles the early scenes when she’s just a loner with iffy social skills. There’s something good happening and perhaps there will be a film one day where that can shine.
I will give MADAME WEB this. It has one of the niftiest product placements I’ve even seen. Not only prominently displayed, but also integral to one of those showdowns. That company surely got its money’s worth. As for ticket-buyers for this bloated morass, I can’t say the same.
Your Thoughts?