Well, gee, now that Dakota Johnson has joined the MCU, who is left? This latest installment of “anyone can be a superhero” has me genuinely wondering, “Who is next? Daniel Radcliffe? Lindsay Lohan? Stormy Daniels?”
The biggest problem with new MCU additions is superpowers. From the spectrum of “undefined” to “is that a power?” the latest MCU heroes have made me believe that, truly, anyone can be a superhero. But is that a good thing? While the wide-ranging accessibility of superheroics should lead to a wider audience, I fear the exact opposite is happening. Because, well, to crib Syndrome — if everybody is super, nobody is super.
This film lost me in the first five minutes. That could be a record for a superhero film. Not even Green Lantern can boast such. Madame Web opens in the Amazon in 1973 with a very pregnant Momma Webb looking for a rare spider, one that can grant super healing abilities, which makes one wonder, of course, why nobody has sought it before. When she finds the rare arachnid, she is immediately undermined by her partner, Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), who shoots her in a scuffle and leaves her for dead. And this is where the film lost me – the bounding, flamboyant, spider-people of the Amazon come to the rescue. The scene would have been ridiculous on a Broadway stage; the fact that this was a key plot point made me believe I was watching a comedy.
Decades later, the in-utero child of venom, Cassandra Webb (Johnson), grows up to be clairvoyant, and therefore super … even though she can’t control her clairvoyance, can’t recognize it as clairvoyance, and doesn’t not how to use it even when she finally understands she is clairvoyant. Meanwhile, Ezekiel has grown up to have super physical spider powers of his own, which are nothing like being Spider-Man. Nothing whatsoever.
Well, good for him. We have to guess that he figured out how to manipulate the stolen spider into giving him powers of strength, speed, dexterity, and all that other good D&D stuff. None of this is explained. And, quite frankly, if one could manipulate the venom of a normal spider to make a superhero, we’d see a ton more evidence of it, even in the comic world. Especially in the comic world.
Ezekiel keeps dreaming of his future death at the hands of three women he doesn’t know, so he enlists a techno expert to track down the women -just girls now- so he might kill them before they kill him.
So, you see what’s going on, right? Ezekiel and Cassandra have visions involving the same three girls: Julia, Anya, and Mattie (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O’Connor) and eventually Cassandra will have to save them while Ezekiel is trying to kill them … and this is the plot of the film. And it might be a decent plot except for the BAGGAGE: first off, it’s silly that the girls are all essentially the same age. Why does that need to be a thing? And this foursome bickers A LOT because no one trusts Cassandra to know what she’s doing (in fact, it’s hard to take on face value that’s she saved them), and nobody is smart to develop a plan … about anything. The plot grew increasingly tiresome with the notion that all the girls proved expendable nobodies with easily discarded plans yet they were all on the same train together clearly bound for somewhere for some reason.
How many times in your life have you gotten on a train thinking, “Yeah, I don’t need to make my destination. No big deal?” I suppose that’s part of the symmetry here, but the symmetry is stupid. And everything is exacerbated by the fact that the script required several more rewrites. Nobody wants to see people argue. And either they buy Madame Web or they do not. The half-assed trust in Cassandra doesn’t work on any level.
On the one hand, the film had a bit of a classic Greek tragedy feel: the villain -in identifying the forces that would eventually become his doom- went out of his way to create -inadvertently- his own nemesis and undoing. I am big fan of stories where the villain’s villainy creates his own downfall. OTOH, Madame Web suffers from the worst of the Minority Report effect: how do you convince people that someone is out to do evil if you prevent them from doing it in the first place?
I found Madame Web more-or-less watchable yet very problematic. Wait. Let me clarify. I found this film mostly watchable … and a little bit stupid: “Gosh, that pigeon is still alive! I wonder if I’m seeing the
future!” One moment, however, made me so uncomfortable I wished I were watching a bloody horror film instead. While in hiding, the teens do a table dance in a diner for random strange boys. Not only was this moronic both in-context and out-of-context (way to lie low, girls), it stank of “What century is this?” sexist direction. Is this your attempt to offset the feminism the film otherwise demonstrates? It couldn’t have been any more disgusting if the girls had started stripping and their new admirers began jamming dollar bills in panties.
I could take Madame Web as an adventure story, but the superhero story is … bad. Really bad. The film would work much better rewritten as a thriller where nobody has super abilities. Simply a guy wants to kill three girls at once, and the one person who can stop him doesn’t know the girls, either. That film might work. It would take a lot of workshopping to create a believable plot and develop smarter heroines, but -ultimately- the film might work.
Madame Web does not.
A woman of extra sensory-vision
Was plagued by her own indecision
Yet she got up the rocks
To save hens from the fox
While the viewers scoffed in derision
Rated PG-13, 116 Minutes
Director: S.J. Clarkson
Writer: Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, Claire Parker
Genre: OK, I give up. What makes a “super” super?
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: You’ll just love anything MCU at this point, huh?
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: If I wanted to see girls bicker for two hours, I’d troll Taylor Swift
