Movie Review: Madame Web

There's a really beautiful irony to Madame Web releasing on the same day that a vocal minority of comic book fans took to social media to extol the virtues of Tim Story's Fantastic Four films as a way to express their disgust with the casting announcement for the upcoming FF MCU reboot. Madame Web is positively overflowing with the type of janky filmmaking, pervasive silliness and horrendously conceived villains that were at the center of Story's films. It even manages to further its commitment to a 00's inept cheeseball aesthetic by taking place in 2003. Maybe time will allow Madame Web to become embraced seemingly out of the blue by the same people that are currently going to bat for Fantastic Four' 05 and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, but that may prove to be a bridge too far as S.J. Clarkson's movie is being released at a time where people are starting to get less romantic about the superhero genre.

In fairness to these people who love Fantastic Four that I didn't know existed until last week, Madame Web doesn't provide much fodder for future revisionist history love. The way that the plot surrounding clairvoyant paramedic Casandra Webb (Dakota Johnson) becoming the reluctant protector of three young girls (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O'Connor) that are being pursued by a superpowered psycho named Ezkiel Simms (Tahar Rahim) who has connections to Webb's deceased mother is constructed doesn't allow for much superhero stuff or meaningful character development to actually occur. Some of the technical aspects (namely the frantic, choppy editing and bizarre, old kung fu movie-esque ADR that's used for about 95% of Rahim's dialogue) are staggeringly bad for a movie of its size. And perhaps most shockingly, there's a conscious effort to dance around the connections it has to Spider-Man-which is really quite the choice considering that it features two supporting characters that anybody who's seen a Spider-Man movie before should have no trouble recognizing. There are some moments where the family brought together by fate dynamic and hunter vs. the hunted story work well enough to demonstrate the potential it had to work as a pretty unique, genre-inspired superhero origin story, but they're ultimately too fleeting to overcome the lack of care or cohesion that is given to the film overall.                           

For all of its missteps, I don't believe Madame Web is among the worst superhero movies to come out in recent years, let alone ever. Hell, the previous Sony Spider-Man-adjacent meme machine Morbius has a messier narrative, considerably stiffer acting and less entertainment value than this. Still, Madame Web is the kind of clunky, uninspired effort that Sony can't afford to churn out if they wish to keep making money off the deepest reaches of the Spider-Man character catalog.               

Grade: C-