The Scottish Mail on Sunday - You
The superhero flop
HEROICS? SHE STOPS A PIGEON HITTING A WINDOW
Have you been watching
Venom: Let There Be Carnage again?
No, but it’s from the same stable – this one is called Madame Web.
So, it’s a Spider-man film? No, a Spider-man adjacent film.
A what?
Spider-man isn’t allowed to be shown. Or mentioned. You’re just supposed to assume that he’s somewhere about but, you know, busy.
Why?
It’s a rights ownership thing around who gets to depict the character on the big screen. Anyway, the upthrust is that movie backer Sony has been dredging up his known associates.
It’s been going through Spider-man’s Rolodex? Exactly. And after getting past ‘Venom’ they’ve landed on ‘Web’.
Who’s Madame Web, then? In the comics she was an elderly clairvoyant.
And who has Sony turned her into?
Dakota Johnson AKA Cassie Webb, a Manhattan paramedic.
OK, so what’s the plot? Ah, that’s where it gets tricky.
Did you fall asleep? That’s not the point because even the reviewers – who are paid to stay awake – haven’t got a clue.
Oh, come on, they must know what was going on. Nope. The Telegraph went with ‘a sort of two-hour explosion in a boringness factory, in which the forces of dullness and stupidity combine in new and infinitely perturbing ways’.
What did others say?
The Guardian (one star) ‘a tangled mess’. The Times (one star) ‘incoherent’. The Independent (one star) ‘embarrassed by its own existence’. The film has one of the lowest Rotten Tomatoes scores (13 per cent) of any superhero film in nearly a decade.
Does Madame Web at least have a good superpower? An ability to see into the future and predict catastrophes – the irony of which has been lost on nobody.
Well, that must at least make for some exciting action.
You’d think so, wouldn’t you, but the disgruntled Telegraph reviewer calculated that it took a full half hour before the movie’s superhero did anything even faintly heroic.
And that was… Preventing a pigeon hitting a window.
Presumably Dakota Johnson can explain things for us. Apparently not. During the press tour she admitted she hadn’t watched the finished film. ‘I don’t know when I’ll see it. Some day,’ she told one interviewer, asking another, ‘Did you see the movie? I haven’t. You know more about it than me.’
I take it there’s a social media backlash underway.
This post on X sums up the general feeling about the confused plotting. ‘Madame Web is one of the best movies ever about Spider-man’s uncle’s coworker.’
Right. So, the storyline seems to be the main problem.
No. That would be the script.
What’s wrong with the script? Audiences have been enthusiastically gathering the best (worst) bits of dialogue, with one from the trailer (‘He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died’) going viral as a meme.
Give me some others.
‘When your heart starts back up again… you’re fine’ and ‘Obviously it was bad... she died’ are among the favourites.
How has Dakota Johnson reacted?
After the trailer was released late last year she ditched her talent agency. Read into that what you will.
Has the film made any money? It cost £64 million to make but grossed just £20 million at its US opening.
So, it’s officially flopped? Badly. One X user went as far as to warn fellow cinemagoers they needed to take precautions. ‘Stay safe out there, everyone... I had two tickets for the Madame Web movie in my car and someone broke in and left four more.’