LOS ANGELES, Feb. 13 (UPI) — “Madame Web,” which opens in theaters Wednesday, is bad in that it never even takes on the debacles of “Catwoman” and “Batman & Robin.”
While those movies were hilariously misguided explorations of the powers of cats and bats, Madame Web has a hard time even explaining its premise.
In 2003, Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson) is a paramedic who avoids interactions with her patients and her partner Ben (Adam Scott). But after her near-death experience, Cassie begins to see a glimpse of the future.
Her nemesis, Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), can see into the future: three women who kill him. Their paths cross when Cassie rescues Julia Cornwall (Sidney Sweeney), Anya Corazon (Isabella Merced), and Matty Franklin (Celeste O’Connor) before Sims arrives.
Seeing the future is a totally awesome superpower, but the movie was even more fun with this concept. Nicolas Cage played a psychic who can see two minutes ahead in “Next,” but the ultimate movie is “Final Destination.”
For Kathy, psychic visions are nothing more than a plot device. The viewer, like Cassie, witnesses the violence, after which she acts differently and is able to escape the danger.
But long before Cassie gains her powers, Madame Web is lost. The exposition that establishes Spider-Man’s connection to the film’s mythology acts like a passing dialogue from a first draft that was never revised.
The film begins in 1973 with Cassie’s mother Constance (Kelly Bishé) exploring the Peruvian Amazon while pregnant. Sims was her assistant, but he managed to betray her and obtain spider powers to use for her evil purposes, but the Peruvian spider saved Constance’s baby.
Comic books and comic book movies allow for plenty of stories about outlandish technology, like the radioactive spider that first gave Peter Parker his powers. The joy of films like Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, Iron Man, and Captain America is the way they honestly explain themselves.
From the moment Sims asks Constance about the spider she’s looking for, it doesn’t feel like a conversation between humans, much less between partners. They are literally telling the audience the information they need for the story, and they do so reluctantly.
Even as supervillains, Sims speak in awkward declarations that wouldn’t even fit in a comic book speech bubble. Sims describes his nightly dreams: I too will be killed someday. ”
If you’ve lived your life believing in nightly prophecies, you can probably think of a more natural way to deliver the news. Later he said: “With each passing day, my scheduled death approaches.”
Maybe if Sims stopped laughing so hard, the superheroes in his sight would have no reason to kill him. Sims also keeps repeating a vague backstory about him coming from nothing, but that’s not important enough to pinpoint the details.
The Sims’ resident hacker, Amalia (Zosia Mamet), first hacks into the National Security Agency in 2003 and marvels at its surveillance. It feels more like a TikToker summarizing Wikipedia than a commentary on the evolved surveillance state. entry.
To show how motivated Constance is, she says that kicking the baby is going to prevent her from doing her job, but she won’t be deterred. Not only is this a terrible line, but it’s also a trick to reveal Constance’s true motives later in the film.
Cassie tries to make fun of his inability to understand what’s going on, from his powers to the Sims or his connection to the three girls. It’s hard to find her funny when she’s so right that Constance’s 30-year-old memo has to blatantly explain her plot to Cassie.
The setting of a lonely woman discovering that she actually has a kind of chosen family is a solid staple of narrative fiction. However, it is because of the plot that Cassie becomes friends with her three girls, not that they have any kind of connection.
Cassie wants to keep the Sims from killing them and teaches them CPR, but they never get to know each other. Each of the three girls has a different scenario in which they were separated from their parents, but they recite those stories as explanations rather than emotional necessity.
Also, not all setups are worth watching. Spider walking, primarily by Sims, has been kept to a minimum.
The action is mostly Cassie and the three girls running away from the Sims, but it’s a mediocre version of a chase movie. Cassie, the ambulance driver, has some useful car moves, but they’re hardly fast and they’re hardly furious.
It takes an entire movie to reveal what Cassie’s real superpowers are, other than her visions. Imagine if Superman didn’t fly until the end, or if Spider-Man didn’t throw his web until the end.
Discovering your powers is often the best part of superhero movies. They still have to get there by the halfway point.
Madame Web is desperate to connect with Spider-Man. Two of his characters from Spider-Man’s backstory appear in the movie, and many more characters are referenced.
On the plus side, Madame Web features more on-location work than standing in front of a screen. They shot in New York, some action scenes were shot in Boston, and they also shot in Los Angeles and Mexico, so it must have taken twice as much filming in Peru.
Unfortunately, Madame Web doesn’t stage any interesting scenes in front of these locations.
At least Catwoman and Batman & Robin believed in what they were doing. They were wrong, but Madame Web feels like a cynical copy of the bare minimum of a comic book movie.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Learn more about his work in the entertainment field here.
