Weekend Watch - Madame Web
Welcome back to the Weekend Watch where each week we take a look at a new piece of film or television media and give it a rating, review, and recommendation. This week’s topic, as voted by the blog’s Instagram followers, is the latest film in the Sony Spider-Verse, Madame Web, starring Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor, Tahar Rahim, Emma Roberts, and Adam Scott. The film opened this weekend and is the first of Sony’s Spider-Verse films to focus on a hero in their roster of Spider-Man comic characters, rather than a villain-turned-antihero. Directed by S.J. Clarkson (Jessica Jones and Love, Nina) and written by Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless (Morbius), Claire Parker, and Clarkson, the film opened in theaters this weekend to the worst reviews for a film yet in Sony’s superhero universe. Let’s get into it.
Letter Grade: D-; it’s a movie that occasionally gets you engaged with what’s going on, so I can’t quite give it an F, but man, we were close here.
Should you Watch This Film? Because watching it in theaters right now would justify Sony continuing to churn out low quality films like this, I can’t recommend going to watch this in theaters; however, it might be just the kind of bad film that you have to see at some point, so… maybe.
Why?
Her web might connect them all, but it might be the most tangled, incomprehensible, poorly cut, and absolutely terrified of plot holes web that has ever been put to screen. Personally, I don’t think that this film’s problems are the fault of the filmmakers so much as the production company that hasn’t put out a good live-action superhero film without Kevin Feige’s involvement since the first Amazing Spider-Man (I like Venom, but I’m not going to so far as to call it “good”). Madam Web is the natural result of a studio full of producers who don’t understand their cinematic audience trying to manufacture a box office hit without actually being willing to commit to any kind of risk. It’s the most egregiously corporatized film I’ve seen since The Emoji Movie, and it’s honestly pretty depressing. It’s clear that, at some point down the line, this film could have been something good because the actors involved at least have the charisma necessary to carry a film like this, but the lack of character development, weak dialogue, odd cuts, forced product placement, baffling use of ADR on Tahar Rahim, and lack of any serious superhero sequences completely undercut whatever potential this film had. (I do want to note here that this is not the worst comic book movie ever made because Catwoman [2004] and Fantastic Four [2015] do still exist, but this is way down there.)
On the positive side, I do think that the casting was well done for this film if only because the actors feel like they could be a good team if the film they currently are in wasn’t constantly getting in the way. There is a cool shot of the characters in their costumes toward the end of the film that briefly got me excited for the potential of seeing Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O’Connor in action together as a team of Spider-Women before I remembered that this film is going to be a critical and box office failure, and Sony will assume it’s because it featured female heroes in its leading roles and not because they over-managed it into oblivion just like they have all their other live action Spider-films post-2014. They certainly look the part of superheroes; this film just doesn’t give them anything to work with in terms of character development, action, or really even costuming.
Every moment of this film feels manufactured to create a superhero film that people will want to like, and because of that, it comes up short at every turn. The action sequences are generic, not overly memorable, and fairly uninspired. The use of Cassandra Webb’s powers feels like a bad rip-off of every other time-loop and future-seeing movie ever made. Tahar Rahim’s voice has been redubbed over basically every scene with absolutely terrible sound mixing on the ADR. The 2000s “nostalgia” references aren’t consistently present enough to actually warrant setting the film twenty years ago, especially when the costumes look like something more out of a 2020s street scene than anything in the 2000s (Dakota Johnson might be great at pulling off the high-waisted skinny jean, but that wasn’t a look in any scenario in 2003). The copious references to Pepsi and Pepsi products is so egregiously shoehorned that you can’t help but laugh by the film’s resolution at the abandoned Pepsi factory. Finally, as a superhero film, it wants to be smartly referential and full of easter eggs, but every attempt is so heavy-handed that any audience that didn’t feel insulted by what Sony executives thought we might miss should probably have their bank accounts checked for deposits from the media conglomerate.
Madame Web contains the pieces of a much better film, but the gap between that potential and the reality of the mess that we got on-screen is so wide that it’s difficult to understand what led to the release of this particular version of the film other than corporate meddling. It’s not a film that you should ever pay to see, but if you can find it for free at some point, it makes for a good lesson in why writers, directors, and actors, along with their production teams should be the ones making most of the decisions for film rather than the production company executives who may or may not actually like movies at all – see David Zaslav and his love of The Flash for reference.
