Bombs away ‘Madame Web’ weaves a subpar tale
An instant candidate for a Razzie Award, Sony’s Marvel-adjacent “Madame Web” arrives out of the Spider-Verse, and it is a stinker. How do you make a comic-book-based superhero origin film about a superhero whose powers are not clear to you (or her) for the first half of the film? We start out in the Peruvian Amazon in 1973 with the hero’s very pregnant mother, Constance (Kerry Bishe), a scientist and arachnologist, searches for a particular spider that she believes has venom that will cure her sick unborn child. Accompanying her is the obviously evil guide Ezekiel Sims (great French actor Tahar Rahim, completely at sea in this mess). He is trying to steal Constance’s notes and her spider.
Cut to 2003 New York City (the film was shot in Boston and Los Angeles). Cassandra, uh, Webb (yes, that is her name), Constance’s healthy grown daughter, is a paramedic in the FDNY performing CPR in Queens. Her partner is Ben Parker (Adam Scott), a nice guy with a resonant name, who does not hit on her, even though she looks like that famous woman in the “Fifty Shades of Grey” movies.
She describes herself as a “model foster child” and is a bit of a loner, living on her own in a walk-up in Chinatown. Cassie begins having visions that she realizes are the future being revealed to her slightly ahead of time. She will team up with three “teenagers”- disagreeable Anya Corazon (Isabel Merced, “Dora and the Lost City of Gold”), rebel Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor, “Ghostbusters: Afterlife”) and apologetic Julia Cornwall (26-year-old Sydney Sweeney of the current hit “Anyone But You”). The women will face Sims, who hasn’t changed at all over the years and who chases them into the subway wearing a black Spidey-like suit. He wants to kill them because every night he dreams of them killing him.
Written by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless of Sony’s godawful “Morbius,” newcomer Claire Parker and director S.J. Clarkson (TV’s “Vinyl”), “Madame Web” is replete with execrable dialogue, crummy chases, badly conceived “visions” and a villain whose attacks don’t succeed for reasons we don’t understand. Zosia Mamet of the HBO hit “Girls” appears in a nothing role as a hacker working for Ezekiel. She can find anyone in NYC in seconds using facial recognition. Cassie watches the sublime Alistair Sim in a “A Christmas Carol” on her TV. Sweeney wears knee socks and a miniskirt and climbs up on a diner table to dance for strange, young men seated around her. Really?
For the most part, “Madame Web” feels like amateur hour. It’s shoddy and inept. Johnson seems like she’s rehearsing instead of acting, and like nothing is real. It’s a weird disconnect for sure. I wish the filmmakers had followed Cassie’s maxim, “Don’t do dumb things.” The young women insist on referring to black-garbed Ezekiel as “ceiling guy.” Why is Emma Roberts in this film as Ben’s very pregnant sister? An all too-usual fate is in store for Mike Epps as a charismatic paramedic.
Cassie drives the endangered girls, who bicker over an old, open bag of beef jerky, to a woodsy, woodpecker-heavy part of New Jersey in a stolen taxi and then leaves them alone in the woods for hours. We hear about “peptides” and Peruvian jungle people known as “Los Aranyos.” The screenwriters think it is clever to adapt a famous line from the original “Star Wars.” Oh, the fans will love it. Cassie finally realizes that she has a “sixth sense.” My sixth sense tells me this “Web” is going to bomb hard.
(“Madame Web” contains violence, action and profanity)