Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (SSU) was an idiosyncrasy long before Madame Web was conceived. 2018’s Venom revealed that star and executive producer Tom Hardy is a bizarre man in the best way possible. Venom: Let There Be Carnage upped the slapstick, puerile tone, and Morbius was a film allegedly best left unviewed (I did). The universe is doomed not to feature Spider-Man (those Disney MCU contracts are mysterious beasts), and their unusual efforts to differentiate themselves from the superhero pack have left them out of touch with popular and critical taste. The worst Madame Web could do was poke a few more holes in the sinking ship, and it’s such an odd swing that it fails to land even that.
To be clear: the value of Madame Web and all the SSU is entirely divorced from quality in my book. As a longtime apologist of Fox’s X-Men series, I appreciate anyone working against the notion that superhero movies are bound to the MCU formula, or even a genre, for that matter. The X-Men movies were a mess, and I loved them for their highs and lows. The SSU has been all lows so far, but they’re throwing away narrow notions of superhero movies, too, which earns them a soft spot in my heart.
The Venom movies are easier to forgive. They’re charmingly bad, anchored by a committed performance from Hardy that deserves the same beloved status Hugh Jackman earned in his decades as Wolverine.
Madame Web, on the other hand, is just bad. Tantalizing close to fun-bad, but just barely straightforward enough to miss the mark.
How did they mess this up? First off, they made it an origin story. Boring, we’re over it, just have a scene where the new superhero’s powers are explained and get to the good stuff. We don’t need Dakota Johnson’s Cassandra Webb running around as a disgruntled paramedic, rejecting thank yous from kids and complaining about New York City traffic. An accident on the job awakens her ability to see into the future, which tips her off that three teenage girls are going to be murdered by a leeringly evil man with spider-like abilities (Tahar Rahim), and her intervention leads to the movie-long discovery of her powers. Only by the end is she truly Madame Web, and boy is it a slog to spend that much time on a plot everyone knows like the back of their hand.
The good news is that there’s fun to be had along the way (mostly unintentionally). The script is a mess of blunt exposition that leads to some hysterically undeliverable lines, which is somehow topped by every single word out of Rahim’s mouth feeling like it was delivered in a sound booth far away from the set and entirely divorced from the tone of the scene.
But what really exemplifies this film’s self-inflicted tomfoolery is a cat. Cassandra is a stubborn loner, you see, which must have made the writers think of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. So they give her a stray cat she calls Cat, as a fun reference. They mercifully resisted casting an orange boy to play the stray (you can’t outdo Orangey, the legendary cat actor featured in Breakfast at Tiffany’s). Instead, they cast an unmistakable rotund chonker to waltz onscreen and lap up some milk.
Two things here. One, why would you cast an overweight cat as your stray? There’s no good answer to this one. Two, many adult cats are lactose intolerant, and even if the kitty can keep it down, cow’s milk doesn’t provide the nutrition they need. Cassandra may as well have given the cat a bowl of the film’s ubiquitous product placement, Pepsi, for all the good she was doing it. Or maybe the film is implying that she doesn’t care about the cat at all and is purposefully inducing diarrhea or bulking up an already big boy? Don’t worry, the movie isn’t that smart. They just made a minor plot point make no sense, a small thing amid major plot points that make no sense.
The other inexplicable, self-inflicted wound is the casting of Dakota Johnson. Her low-key, borderline petulant presence makes absolutely no sense as a burgeoning hero, and whether this incongruity is a positive or negative will entirely come down to personal taste. For me, she operated as a salve that nearly healed the whole thing. She never feels like she wants to be in the movie, and the most verve she brings is when she’s seemingly playing with the material, talking down to the very movie she’s leading. Johnson has long been making promotional work performance art (remember her takedown of Ellen DeGeneres?), and with Madame Web, she’s seemingly targeted this playful disdain for industry requirements on the ubiquity of superhero movies. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part, and she just delivered a terrible performance.
Either way, the performance is hilariously off-kilter, as jarring and strange as all of Michelle Williams’ work in the Venom movies, hence, making it of a piece with the rest of the SSU. The SSU just happens to be awful, so bad some raise up the films as fun-bad. I’m not quite there on Madame Web, but I bet there’s a slightly worse cut of the film that could nudge me over the edge.
Release: Available now in theaters
Director: S.J. Clarkson
Writers: Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, Claire Parker, S.J. Clarkson
Cast: Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor, Tahar Rahim, Adam Scott, Mike Epps, Emma Roberts
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