It’s truly remarkable how much mileage Sony Pictures have gotten from its live action Spider-Man Universe despite the fact that Spider-Man isn’t actually in it. Well, two Venom movies and a Morbius related misfire deep and with an unnecessary Kraven The Hunter film waiting in the wings, it’s time for whole clutch of Spider-Women to swing in and try their best and fill that incresingly conspicuous Peter Parker-shaped hole.
For those not particularly intimate with over sixty years of Spider-Man continuity, Madame Web is an old, blind, wheelchair-bound, clairvoyant who would pop up every now and then to offer worrying premonitions she’s managed to gleam from her connections to the “Web of Life” and if that doesn’t sound exactly like the makings of blockbuster thriller, let’s not forget that it didn’t seem to slow Sony down when it wanted to make a superhero movie about a crippled scientist who turned himself into a vampire vigilante after tinkering with bat DNA. But surely the studio has learnt from its Morbius-shaped-mistakes with this new infusion of Spider-girl power, right?
It’s 2003 and Cassandra Webb is a paramedic on the streets of New York who has a noticeable disconnect with her peers due to many unresolved issues stemming from her mother dying during childbirth, but after being resuscitated after a drowning indecent by her partner, Ben, she starts having precognitive visions that suggest bad shit is about to go down. The reason for this stems from a backstory so absurdly convoluted and painfully entangled in the Spider-Man mythos that the least farfetched thing about it is Cassandra’s fortuitous surname. It seems that back in her days exploring the Peruvian rainforest for a brand new species of spider, Cassandra’s pregnant mother was bitten by one of the very arachnids she was searching for after shifty her partner, Ezekiel Simms, violently double crosses her and as a result, the funky venom running through her DNA kicks in after her near-death experience which causes her new abilities.
Speaking of abilities, Ezekiel Simms has since used the spider he stole all those years ago to give him advanced spider powers of the more familar kind, but he’s been constantly plagued by inconvenient nightmares of his murder at the hand of three spider powered women which suggests that catching spider powers is actually as common as getting frickin’ chickenpox. In order to preserve everything he’s built (although we’re not really filled in to what that actually is) he plans to kill the girls – Julia Cornwall, Anya Corazon and Mattie Franklin respectively – before they gain their powers and eventually kill him. However, thanks to her talent of seeing things before they happen like a walking, talking Final Destination movie, Cassandra finds herself as the very reluctant guardian of a trio of girls who desperately need both a parental figure and someone who can defeat a murderous spider person.
Be warned, here be spoilers… During the run of this much maligned Sony Spider-Man Universe (SSU, if you wanna get cute) we’ve currently seen the studio attempt to give various Spidey anti-heroes some extraordinarily clunky origin movies with them ranging from “Ok, I guess” (Venom) and downright laughable (Morbius), however, with Madame Web they are now trying something more directly Spider-Man related, but the closer the franchise hews to it’s legally off limits, wall-crawling centre, the more strained the universe becomes. It doesn’t take a clairvoyant the calibre of Cassandra Web to predict that her debut movie is a chaotic mess, but the fact that the universe seems utterly incapable of pulling its shit together is now becoming something of a viral in-joke.
The truly annoying thing is, that at its core, Madame Web has some legitimately intriguing concepts going for it which were obviously smooshed by countless rewrites in order to crudely panel-beat the story into something that’ll slot into a connected universe that hasn’t even taken form yet. As a result, we get a web-load of foreshadowing about the arrival of a baby Peter Parker that goes as far as making his future Uncle Ben (a permanently confused looking Adam Scott) and his pregnant mother (a grimacing Emma Roberts) major characters. However, while this may seem like the only way Sony can legally squeeze Peter Parker into a non-MCU, live action movie, all it does is dilute the legend of the original. If there were at least five spider people scuttling about New York back in 2003, how does that make what happens to Peter Parker random or special – and why is Ezekiel extreme parkouring about the city trying to kill people dressed in an off-colour Spider-Man costume if the original hasn’t even been born yet?
If the weird contortions the movie pulls in order to try and be part of a larger picture proves to be somewhat painful, that’s nothing compared to the movie itself which seems steadfast on shaking the faith in female-led superhero movies until it’s all but expired by picking up the worst habits of pre-2008 comic book movies and super charging it with magical spider venom. Remember how annoying superhero origin movies were when you wouldn’t see the completed hero in their costume until the end of the film? Well strap in for disapointment when you find out that the not only is Webb given the same treatment, but her trio of female spider charges don’t even get their powers in this movie and all the clips you’ve seen of Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Conner suited up in the trailer are all – you guessed it – precognitive visions of the future. So now we have the baffling paradox of technically not having any Spider-Women in a Spider-Women movie that exists in a Spider-Man franchise that hasn’t got Spider-Man in it, what does the movie have left?
Well, aside from dull, confusing action, predictable characterisation and a villain flatter than a spider crushed with a rolled up newspaper, the one gleaming aspect among the film is Dakota Johnson’s central performance, which truly has to be seen to be believed. With every passing interview she gives about Madame Web, it’s becoming amusingly apparent that all the rewrites and green screen hasn’t made her a fan, and while her character is supposed to start of somewhat misanthropic, her disdain for the film has seemingly leaked into her acting which either stands as the most accidently awkward superhero performance ever put on film or the greatest snapshot of passive aggressiveness against a movie you’re likely to see in quite some time with bizarre line readings and lifeless exposition all delivered though a disconnected, blank stare. It might be one of the best, bad performances I’ve seen in ages and the fact that in might be deliberate just proves that, beyond the global mocking of Morbius, the SSU just simply, isn’t working.
While admittedly watchable in a lazy, check-your-phone-every-five-minutes, kind of way, if the future of the comic book movie is truly in Sony’s hands in 2024, it won’t take spider powers to foresee the worst, possible outcome.
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