Dakota Johnson embraces pure camp of ultra silly ‘Madame Web’

Once upon a time, comic book movies used to be camp, riding the line of silliness and sincerity that would suit the cinematic adaptation of a slim illustrated volume about superheroes and their exploits. But over 20 years ago, the superhero industrial complex rejected camp, becoming dark and gritty, then sarcastic and flip, then cycling back to wholesomely earnest again for a time. However, in these days of waning superhero enthusiasm, fatigue setting in, it seems there’s an opening for comic book movies to be stupid — stupidly fun — again, especially if “Madame Web” can tell their fortunes.

To get a little pretentious about the latest ultra silly Sony Marvel movie, Susan Sontag, you would have loved “Madame Web.” Or maybe she would have found it offensive. Either way, it perfectly fits the rubric she lays out in her famed essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” because, to borrow the phrase, “Madame Web” is a comic book movie “in quotation marks.”

It is also the purest form of camp in that it is unintentionally so; certainly director and co-writer S.J. Clarkson, the director of dozens of television episodes, including the Marvel series “Jessica Jones” and “The Defenders,” didn’t intend for “Madame Web” to be as silly as it is. The writers, Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, who wrote the last baffling Sony Marvel movie, “Morbius,” are also responsible for the film’s campiness, in that the dialogue on display here is laughably cumbersome and unnatural.

But the most important element of the camp on display in “Madame Web” is the madame herself, Dakota Johnson, who has a preternatural ability to apply the aforementioned “quotation marks” to a line reading with the combination of her guileless blue eyes and a smirk on her lips.

Is “Madame Web” a good movie? No. Is it hilariously delightful? Often yes. The film follows an obscure Marvel character who has the ability to see the future because she was bit by a poisonous spider in utero while her mom was researching spiders in the Amazon.

As Cassie Web, Johnson is so compellingly weird that you can’t take your eyes off of her. She delivers every clunker of a line with her full chest and a twinkle in her eye.

Sontag wrote that to talk about camp is to betray it, and it’s impossible to accurately describe the bad-good charms of “Madame Web,” an appreciation of which requires the kind of sensibility that celebrates the unnatural, the artificial, the exaggeratedly “off.” Johnson gets it, and for those who also do, it’s kind of a thrill to get tangled in her web.