Review: ‘Madame Web’ Joins The Spider-Verse (For Better Or Worse)
by David Lewis
Madame Web, the latest entry in Sony’s “Spider-verse Without a Spider-Man” series is unspooling on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, DVD, and digital next week.
In an interesting attempt to stave off superhero fatigue, Madame Web tells the origin story of a fairly obscure supporting character from the pages of Marvel’s Amazing Spider-Man, but adds a time-bending twist. The result is an inessential and convoluted tale that never really gels, despite some real potential.
A 1973 prologue set in the Amazon finds a pregnant explorer, Constance Webb (Kerry Bishé), discovering a rare species of spider only to be betrayed by her partner, Ezekial (Tahar Rahim), who steals the eight-legged freak and leaves Constance to die. Instead, she’s taken in by a group of spiritual spider-worshippers who deliver her baby with the help of spider-serum.
30 years later, Webb’s daughter, Cassandra (Dakota Johnson), has grown into an NYC paramedic who has no memory of her mysterious birth, but is haunted by clairvoyant “spidey sense” abilities. After a near-death experience, Cassandra develops a psychic connection with three teen girls (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O’Connor), who are also destined to use their burgeoning superhero talents to fight evil. That includes Ezekial, who is likewise caught in Cassandra’s psychic web and fated to face her and her sidekicks using his own arachnid-based abilities.
It all ends, like almost all recent superhero films do, with a multi-person, heavily CGI-assisted battle on top of a tall structure (this one is a giant, lighted Pepsi Cola sign, in one of the more brazen displays of product placement in recent memory). You don’t have to be clairvoyant to know who wins, but you do have to be a longtime ASM fan to know that Cassandra survives the fight only to be blinded and wheelchair-bound in order to look more like her Marvel Comics counterpart.
Johnson has a laconic acting style that sometimes works, but seems more like pure disinterest this time around. Her spooky flashes of the near future come across more like strange instances of deja vu than truly unsettling visions, like those experienced by Christopher Walken in David Cronenberg‘s 1984 The Dead Zone. Meanwhile, Rahim is hammy in all the wrong ways, and the trio of Sweeney, Merced, and O’Connor just can’t do much with their one-dimensional characterizations. The film’s worst offense is that it’s often boring for long stretches, where characters go over exposition and explain plot points and character traits to each other (sometimes more than once).
Madame Web is presented as a standalone entry in Sony’s live action Spider-verse saga (you know, the one that doesn’t include Spider-Man due to corporate contractual agreements), and the film takes places in the early 2000s, apparently before Spidey or Venom would have appeared in this universe. But it’s still disconcerting when Ezekial shows up in a black spidersuit and no one mentions any of the other heroes and villains of this timeline (not even poor Morbius!).
The physical releases’ bonus features are fairly lackluster as well. There’s a brief deleted scene between Johnson and supporting player Adam Scott that doesn’t add much, a gag reel scored with the requisite music library dance ditty, and featurettes that retread plot points.
Oddest of all is a look at Madame Web‘s Easter Eggs, in which first-time feature director SJ Clarkson really reaches to make connections between the comics and the film to convince longtime fans that she and the producers had them in mind on set. For example: Did you notice that the emergency code (210) that Johnson uses in one early scene directly corresponds to the ASM issue number in which Madame Web made her debut? Of course not. Is that even an Easter Egg?
Madame Webb arrives on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, DVD, and digital on April 30th. A limited edition 4K UHD/Blu-ray steelbook will also be available.
