There is something uniquely, profoundly sad about the fact that someone signed off on releasing Madame Web in the state that it is.
Indeed, after watching the latest from Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, most of you will rightfully walk away thinking that Sony just really hates superhero movies, and is going out of its way to gut whatever characters it can (legally) get its hands on so as to worsen the public’s perspective on the genre, because Madame Web‘s disastrously-woven pile of flaws exceeds the descriptive limits not only of the English language, but of the very collective of contrived sound itself.
Right from its passionless outset, the film’s largest, most foundational problem is made immediately apparent; the entire essence of Madame Web blows right past the cynicism and lack of confidence that we’ve come to expect from the SSU, and quite tragically operates in a state of what can only be described as self-hatred. This is a movie that’s so dangerously unconcerned with its own presentation that it was deemed acceptable to have Ezekiel Sims’ lips very clearly not match up with the words being spoken on multiple occasions (yes, that actually happens several times in the movie).
Since we’re tangentially on the topic of performances now, it’s clear as day that not a single person present had any faith whatsoever in the material — and why would they? If the film’s dialogue is indeed reflective of the shooting script (which very clearly was not the same one that Dakota Johnson and company initially received), then just reading this film must no doubt have been an absolute slog and a half. To describe the performances of the four leads (including Johnson, as well as Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O’Connor) as wooden, uninspired, and without any believable chemistry isn’t inaccurate, but one struggles to imagine what they possibly could have done to make the material work at all. Tahar Rahim’s performance as the aforementioned antagonist Ezekiel, meanwhile, evokes the energy of an angsty clown fiesta at which even the cheesiest Saturday morning cartoons would sneer — but maybe that’s just what happens when your whole performance takes place in an ADR booth, as his did, by all appearances.
As for the dialogue itself, it has this almost genuinely impressive ability to, scene-by-scene, manifest as the absolute worst cinematic burden it could possibly be, and then some. Whether it’s the tonally detached banter between the three Spider-Teens, Cassie Webb offering up another round of exposition that tries and fails to sound like it’s coming from a human, or all four of them reaching the peak of their interpersonal character development by way of an impromptu CPR lesson (spoiler alert, it’s not much of a peak), the film’s dialogue not only sounds and reads like a soulless Wikipedia entry, but also relentlessly boasts the intensely irritating quirk of unplugging itself from the rest of the film’s context to desperately try and prompt an unrelated reaction from the audience (the line “you won’t like me when I’m hangry” is in this movie twice, if that’s any indication to exactly how low Madame Web reaches).
But, of all the symptoms that spring up directly from Madame Web‘s penchant for self-sabotage (and again, it’s genuinely difficult to tell if it was deliberate or not), the worst of them is its inability to understand any facet of what it is, and so it subsequently approaches each and every one of its scenes without the tools or coherence necessary to even make them work as individual pieces.
Indeed, forget the nonsensical plot beats, the painful performances, and the dialogue that grabs your hand to lead you out of the movie whenever it can. Let’s address instead the more intrinsic “why” behind what will no doubt be remembered as a legendary fumbling of the genre; what is it about Madame Web‘s approach to the action-comedy blend so often found in most comic books movies (both good and bad) that causes it to nosedive so harshly?
It’s because most all comic book movies, on some level, approach both their source and written material with a marked level of confidence; even the poorer examples like Shazam! Fury of the Gods, which spends most of its time grasping for straws, at least grasps for those straws with a very intimate zest; one that’s in harmony with an identity of some kind, and also knows what it’s going for, even if neither the identity or the goal of the film offer much in the way of artistic nutrition.
Madame Web doesn’t know what straws it’s grasping for. Worse still, it doesn’t care about itself enough to even make an attempt at grasping for whatever straws may or may not have existed throughout the whole lifetime of the film’s production. Given how unique this film’s take on the character and the genre could have been, given its premise, the chief emotion that Madame Web may end up creating is anger: anger at these actresses being tricked, effectively, by the initial promise of a better script (because it certainly couldn’t have been worse); anger at how carelessly these characters are being treated by a company that has to know, at this point, that they’re no match for its older, Disney-backed cousin; and anger at how poorly-treated the film has been, by sufficiently complicit suits and hacks, that it wound up on the big screen in the state that it did. Indeed, it’s not Madame Web itself that should be the target of the anger, but rather the specific parameters of the spaces it inhabited prior to its release, and the forces that allowed it to be the blight on cinema that it is.
All-in-all, what else is there to say? Madame Web is a notoriously foul piece of work, and my heart genuinely goes out to all who were, are, and will be affected by it — whether that’s an honest artist or technician who didn’t know what they were getting into, those involved with the creation of the original comic book character who now have to see Madame Web be the laughingstock of pop culture for a hot minute, or any future audience member bent on getting a first-hand reading on the film’s failures, and thereafter feels their already non-existent expectations all but implode. It’s truly a dark day for superhero movies.
