Madame Web: An American Superhero Debacle To End All Debacles

EVEN BY THE Sony Spider-Man Universe’s ('SSU' apparently — because we need a surrogate Marvel universe like we need another WhatsApp group that could’ve been an email) deplorable standards — two Venom movies and one Morbius disaster so far — Madame Web is very, very, very bad. It is incompetently directed, blandly written, horribly shot, horrifically edited and poorly acted. Ironically, Dakota Johnson, who plays the titular character, is probably the best thing about the film. But you’d have to be 50 shades of cray to visit the nearest IMAX screen to see her play the younger version of a comic character who is an old, blind and paralysed clairvoyant. She has monopolised the sexy-but-awkward 30-something prototype on screen, but her co-star is mostly a green screen here. She is reduced to a Final Destination protagonist trapped in the wrong story. More on that later. Or soon.

So Madame Web opens with a Jumanji-level sequence in the ‘Peruvian Amazons’ in 1973, where a pregnant woman researching spiders is killed by a greedy explorer (Tahar Rahim, why?) who escapes with a miraculous spider. Naturally, the baby — who is saved by a super-mythical tribe dressed in tacky spider-wear — grows up to become a paramedic named Cassie Web in New York City in 2003. Now this is technically a year after Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man movie rocked the world, and there could be weird possibilities. More so because there’s a Ben Parker (a.k.a Uncle Ben), Cassie’s work partner, whose sister Mary is pregnant with a future Peter Parker, which means Spider-Man will be 21 in 2024 and…forget it. What’s the point? The brilliant animated movie Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse warned us precisely about the perils of crisscrossing spider canons and their stunning lack of originality. But clearly, Sony Pictures didn’t read their own memo.

Back to the plot. Cassie Web starts to develop psychic-like powers, where she can see the immediate future. If she acts fast, she can even prevent it from happening. Case in point: She foresees a pigeon flying into her window and dying, so she opens the window before it flies in; I’d have kept it shut because pigeons are the most useless birds on this planet. Parallely, that greedy explorer is now a dark-spiderman billionaire named Mr Sims, and he can see a recurring future where he is killed by three masked spider-woman-esque superheroes. Therefore, like most geniuses who don’t know how destiny works, our villain begins to track down these three teen strangers — who turn out to be Julia (Sydney Sweeney, still playing a schoolgirl), Mattie (Celeste O’Connor) and Anya (Isabela Merced) — to kill them and save himself from his own alleged future. Somehow, Cassie sees these girls’ doomed futures and feels compelled to save and babysit and protect them from a rampaging Sims.

She essentially becomes a mother-mentor to three brats: a poor little rich girl, a poor girl, and a girl. This involves a lot of scenes where Cassie simply intercepts Sim’s almost-murders by mowing him down in cars or trucks. It also involves moments where the teens dance to Britney Spears hits, show sass to Cassy, and get into trouble for repeatedly appearing in a middle-aged rich man’s dreams. In between, Cassie even has the time to pop into the jungles of Peru and ‘confront her past’ by locating her mother’s true intentions. The Amazonians are expecting her, of course. (These Americans and their strong passports.) You can tell that Cassie is still a novice at using her mind, though, because she couldn’t stop this film critic from going home and panning a movie about her. She couldn’t tell that this would be the worst Marvel-based superhero movie in a year where there are no Marvel movies slated for release. She’ll get better, I’m sure.

The problem with Madame Web is that — unoriginal screenplay aside — it is technically inept. The depiction of Cassie’s 10-seconds-later psychic powers is appallingly cut and designed. Apparently, director SJ Clarkson was captivated by the psychological and cerebral aspect of Cassie’s character. At times, it feels like the film itself is stuck in a loop of NG takes. The visual effects look like a giant video-game glitch, and the action set pieces — at a warehouse, a subway, a diner, a Manhattan street — unfold as if two versions of the same movie are locked in eternal battle: An unwatchable version and a deafening version. At least it caters to different senses. There is no momentum, no rhythm, no perception of space or time or order. Not a shot seems to last more than half a second before something happens and something else starts happening; it bombs the screen with random, scattered frames in the hope that an illusion of a scene emerges. The camerawork is so dizzying — rotating and trembling like a drunken spider that thinks it’s a sober bee — that you wonder if a malfunctioning rollercoaster ride might have been less exacting.

The climax puts even the jumbled chaos of the nutty Marvel climaxes to shame. There is a big battle on top of a New York bridge, I think, which resembles the 2003 film, except that there are five characters who have no idea what they’re doing or when they’re falling. The lights are blinding, as if it were an open-air discotheque on steroids. Watching it in IMAX should come with a trigger warning. A cat could make a more coherent movie. No, not you Catwoman, don’t you dare.