Unlike some (many?), I haven’t grown weary of superhero films as a genre. What I have grown exhausted by are specifically Sony-made Spider-Verse movies that try to walk the line between standalone works while also incorporating just enough Spier-Man-adjacent references to frustrate and infuriate viewers. I wish the makers of Madame Web had simply stayed away from all things Spider-Man (which is virtually impossible, once you understand the full breadth of the story). Instead, they drop in what they think are sly nods and easter eggs that are neither subtle nor clever. Much like the rest of the screenplay (it took four people to write this!), the references are ham-fisted and all-around sloppy, and leave us with the promise of a better sequel that I can almost guaranteed you will never be made.
Let me give an example: the film is set very specifically in 2003, and there’s a character named Mary Parker (Emma Roberts), who is probably eight months pregnant. Please feel free to do the math on who her baby is. She’s married to a man (whom we never see) whose brother is Ben Parker (Adam Scott) and who is really looking forward to being an uncle to this newborn—all the fun, none of the responsibility (that’s what he thinks). And no, I don’t consider any of this spoiler territory because the character names are right there on IMDB, and Scott is prominently featured in the trailers. All of this nonsense is a tease that never pays off. At one point, there’s a baby shower for Mary, during which the women in attendance have to guess the baby’s name. The game is interrupted before the inevitable name drop, so I’m thinking that reveal is coming at the end of the film (which it probably was at one point). But no, there aren’t even any mid- or post-credits scenes in Madame Web to tuck away such a choice nugget of web-slinging joy.
But of course, anything involving the Parkers is shoehorned into the mostly unrelated story of Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson), whose mother (Kerry Bishé) was killed in the rainforests of Peru while searching for a rare breed of spider whose venom might be the key to curing any number of diseases. She is also very pregnant, and in the company of security specialist Ezekiel Sims (French actor Tahar Rahim, most recently seen in Napoleon), who betrays her when she finds the spider and accidentally shoots her before absconding with the specimen. But a tribe of locals with mysterious spider-like powers (and outfits that look a lot like Spider-Man’s duds, if they were made on Gilligan’s Island) show up to try and save her by injecting her with the aforementioned spider venom. The mom dies but baby Cassandra lives and is sent home to live out her years in New York's foster care system.
Cassandra grows up to become a paramedic (alongside partner Ben Parker) and after a near-death experience in which she almost drowns, she starts having visions of things that will happen in the immediate future, things she can change if she does something different or gets someone else to change their behavior. She sees herself and other people die, and so she does all that she can to save everyone in her visions. We also find out that Ezekiel is a little more adept at seeing the future than using the spider venom repeatedly, and he envisions three young women in various spider-themed costumes and powers defeating him in a fight. So, he hires a computer expert (Zosia Mamet) to track them down so he can kill them. Ezekiel actually functions as a costumed individual who leaps and crawls and has the general acrobatic skills of a certain Spider-Man who won’t actually exist for a couple of decades.
During the course of her day-to-day happenings, Cassandra just happens to run into all three of these young women (minus their powers) around the city, including a rich kid whose parents are never around, Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney, complete with schoolgirl outfit); Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced), who has been living with her immigrant grandfather illegally in Cassandra’s building; and skater punk and general troublemaker Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor). Cassandara saves their lives when Ezekiel attacks them on a train, and they are basically stuck together for the rest of the film, although the police seem to think Cassandra has kidnapped them. Like many aspects of Madame Web, it’s a running gag that never pays off.
As mentioned, most of the film is about the potential for something cool that we never get. The only time we see the three young women in their admittedly cool superhero costumes are in visions of the future. We’re not even given their future superhero names (for the record, two of them are different incarnations of Spider-Woman in the comic books, while Corazon goes by the name Araña), probably because they don’t want to make fans mad that these are in any way Spider-man related. In broader terms, first-time feature director S.J. Clarkson wants us seeing the Madame Web identity as someone who uses her powers to see the connections between people before the world makes them happen. As the film goes on, Cassandra is able to see further into the future and make more sweeping changes and adjustments to the world-to-come that makes her immensely powerful and able to lead the team of young women to fight crime down the road, presumably enhancing them with venom from this rare spider. Who the hell knows?
Placing the Parkers in close proximity to Cassandra seems to serve no purpose, at least not in this story, but the implication is that somewhere down the line this powerful spider might be the reason that this universe’s Peter gets his powers, and not some radioactive arachnid. Again, it’s all about teasing the potential without actually seeing it to any kind of satisfying conclusion. And it makes the entirely of Madame Web frustrating in its best moments and downright infuriating in its worst. I also realized while watching this movie is that, while Dakota Johnson is fully capable of turning in great performances when given great material, she’s not quite capable of elevating mediocre material. She’s as bored and uninvested in her character and this movie as we are, and it clearly shows. Madame Web feels like it was chopped up and re-assembled from another, probably equally poor film, and the result is a wildly uneven, uninspired mess.
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