Madame Web – Review
It’s time to talk about Sony’s newest movie set in their Spider-verse that doesn’t have or even mention Spider-Man. This one has kind of flown under the radar from a marketing standpoint, but, as it’s dropping in February, can we deduce anything about the film from that?
Let’s go find out.
**NOTE: Read Mark’s review below, then use the audio/video links below to hear him and Special Guest Val Cameron discuss the movie in more depth. Remember, though, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**
117 Minutes, Rated PG-13
Written by Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, Claire Parker
Directed by S.J. Clarkson
Synopsis:
Cassandra Webb develops the power to see the future. Forced to confront revelations about her past, she forges a relationship with three young women bound for powerful destinies, if they can all survive a deadly present.
Wow. From that synopsis, this movie sounds pretty lame; but is it?
Firstly, let me clarify that I don’t have a dog in this fight. I like Spider-Man, but I’m not a Spider-Scholar with an encyclopedic knowledge of his entire rogues gallery and all of the various spin-off characters he’s had over the years. I have to go into this one looking at two things:
1) Does the movie work ON ITS OWN as a narrative?
and
2) How well does it — or DOES IT EVEN? — play well with the other entries in the aforementioned Sony Spider-Verse?
Okay, let’s start with number 2, since that’s the easier to break down:
Set primarily in 2003 (with a brief introduction set in the Peruvian Amazon in 1973), and with how the film plays out in terms of the origins of its various spider-based heroes (and their relative ages), Madame Web cannot be from the Tom Holland-centric cinematic timeline.
Similarly, this timeline precludes the film from being from either the Andrew Garfield or Tobey Maguire timelines.
Madame Web is, for all intents and purposes, a film that is “siloed” in terms of its Spider-bretheren.
And. That’s. Perfectly. Okay.
This film doesn’t have to be directly connected to any of those, or Venom, or even Morbius, as, since we are now in the age of the multiverse, any connections can be made later, as evidenced by the “Spider-Verse” films.
So, with that matter cleared up, how does Madame Web stack up as a stand-alone film?
It’s… not bad.
The effects are solid, with Madame Web‘s prophetic strands looking especially cool. The various spider costumes of our young co-stars (when they are shown) also look suitably comicbook-y while not looking cartoony, if that makes sense.
The is always a bit of a problem when it comes to movies using precognition like this, and it’s that there is a lot of repetition of scenes to drive home the point that things are being changed.
But it can be overdone, or even underdone, really. It’s a balancing of act using the conceit to the right point. With Madame Web, I felt that they got that balance right about 70% of the time.
Other times, it’s too much.
Our young stars present another issue with the film, and that is the inconsistency of their characters. This is a knock on the script, as there are sequences in here that are just completely out of place with what we have already been told/shown about said characters. It’s jarring and narratively uncomfortable from a viewer’s standpoint.
Case in point: the diner scene. What the hell even is that?
Anyway, the film also suffers from a villain problem, and not even the one you might think. Introduced in the 1973 prologue, he exists in 2003 as a rich, powerful man, but we have no idea what he actually does in terms of that. Is he a dark Mark Zuckerberg techno-barron? Is he a Justin Hammer-esque arms supplier. Is he a straight up criminal, a la Kingpin?
We. Don’t. Know.
And that’s a problem, because without that, we can’t really understand his motives, and without that, is he really a villain or simply a plot device?
So how well, in the end, does Madame Web do?
Look, we all get that Morbius isn’t even the cinematic low bar for superhero movies… it’s the bracket that holds the low bar up off the floor.
Madame Web clears that bar… easily.
Is it a perfect film? No.
Personally, I put it above Venom 2, but below (but close to) the original Venom in terms of quality and enjoyability.
But, going back to number 2, for a moment, Madame Web does contain a hefty (and I mean HEFTY) amount of Easter Eggs for fans to try to force connections to some things, though none of those connections are concrete except insofar as they can be used to reinforce the basic multiversal fact that the “same” individual can exist in multiple timelines but with different circumstances surrounding them.
That said, the Easter Eggs are cute and almost, but not quite, distracting from the rest of the film.
Madame Web is certainly worth checking out, and with a budget allegedly around $80M, it’s not going to take much to avoid the “bomb” label in terms of box office success.
It deserves that.
Madame Web hits theaters this Valentine’s Day and stars Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor, Tahar Rahim, Adam Scott, Emma Roberts, Zosia Mamet, and Mike Epps.
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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