The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend Madame Web
You know you are in for a special treat when everyone’s contacts at Marvel Studios are all saying, “Dude, I swear we had absolutely nothing to do with this one.” No one wanted credit for it. You know how a modern movie has fifteen production company plates at the start of it these days? There were only two for Madame Web “In association with Marvel” meaning this is as far as we can distance ourselves from this thing without endangering our IP rights and Columbia Pictures. Sony did not put their own company stamp on it.
The project was commanded into production by Amy Pascal when she was trainwrecking her way through Sony in the wake of Trump and #MeToo. When she got fired for of all things blithering incompetence, it ground to a crawl but was finally brought back to life after Spiderman: No Way Home.
I can say this for it, Madame Web is a welcome reminder that a movie doesn’t have to be Woke to be bad. And I will give credit where it’s due, this one isn’t Woke. It’s just bad. However, it did have its good points.
Or if not good, at least acceptable points.
In the comics, Madame Web is a woman in the Spiderman Universe who has myasthenia gravis but is also precognitive. They kind of respected that to a degree. Pretty much. At least a little. I guess.
The movie starts out in 1973 with Cassandra Webb’s mother in the Peruvian jungle looking for a super rare and magical spider. I’ll give the movie this much, they actually do provide a reasonable explanation for a woman to be doing something as stupid as going into the bush when she is eight and half months pregnant.
She finds the super spider and then one of her guides kills everyone and mortally wounds her. Then he steals the spider. Before he can finish her off, a tribe of… Okay, take a deep breath here. A tribe of jungle spidermen rescues her. They take her to some glowing lake where they let another magical spider bite her. She gives birth to Cassandra and dies. One of the tribe members tells the baby he will teach her when it is time.
Well, that’s nice, I suppose.
Fast forward thirty years and Cassandra is now an NYPD fireman in 2003. After we get to know her a little bit we find she’s lonely and anti-social woman. After she accidentally drowns, her precognitive powers start warming up. They bring her back back using CPR. Remember that, it’s important. You see it’s super easy to bring back anybody with CPR. Works every time and then they blink their eyes like they were having a nap and go on about the rest of the day as if nothing happened.
The writer was obsessed with CPR but clearly didn’t know a damn thing about it. In the second heaviest-handed foreshadowing scene in a film that was packed to the gills with it, Cassandra spends five minutes of screen time teaching the girls how to do CPR… AND DOES IT WRONG! It was just chest compressions and that was it. There was no effort in any of the CPR scenes in this movie to use mouth-to-mouth or any other kind of resuscitation. This is something your average audience member knows all about. I can only guess they were deliberating trying to avoid any lesbian coding to set themselves apart from Disney. Good for them?
Anyway, the bad guy, Ezekiel Sims wakes up from a nightmare where is being killed by Spiderwoman, Spider-Woman, and Spider Girl. Spider Gwen sat that one out. He’s not cool about being murdered and uses his venom to force an NSA agent to give him her a password, then murders her.
Since he sees them every night he knows what they look like and constructs accurate computer constructs of their faces which you couldn’t possibly do with early 2000s CG. So he uses these constructs to hunt them using facial ID.
This movie needed much better technical advisors. The script was a big pile of dumb. The bad part was that they were providing explanations for things best left unexplained. If they had just gone with my super hacker has entered the NSA’s facial recognition database, I would have muttered bullshit and accepted it. The problem is once they provide the explanation of a stolen password, I immediately start wondering why the hell the NSA isn’t tracking this off-site remote login. A login by the way that belongs to an agent that has gone missing. I honestly kept expecting Homeland to kick in the hacker’s door and it never happened.
On top of that, the hacker had a wall of huge LCDs in 2003. The tech was available and 2003 was the first year that LCDs outsold tubes but throwing in a few CRTs would have helped sell the period.
On the other hand, it was getting so many other things wrong, I shouldn’t let that one bother me.
Cassandra sees all three of the spider females being killed in a vision that takes place on the subway and hustles them off the train just as Sims attacks. Sims kills a few cops while Cassandra and the girls escape. She steals a cab and shoves the girls into it.
The cab became a running joke, (for the audience you understand). Cassandra must have become deeply attached to the cab because she drove for nearly the rest of the freaking movie. At one point as a sop I guess to the audience’s bullshit tolerance, she prys off the license plate but then throws it on the ground.
By her parked cab.
Apparently happy in the belief that cops won’t pull over a taxi without a plate, or one whose serial number, (WHICH IS PRINTED ON THE SIDE OF THE CAB), matches that of a stolen Taxi. Also a woman vaguely matching her description was wanted in connection with the abduction of three teenage girls and the killing of several police officers, and appears to have stolen that very cab. At one point Cassandra flies off to Peru, goes into the jungle to meet with her spirit guide and then comes back to NYC. This had to have taken a week. And. She. Is. Still. Driving. That. Cab. Okay, taxis don’t get parked in the LaGuardia garage, let alone be parked for a week without a plate!
Another headache-inducing point. This was in 2003, in New York City, not even two years after 9-11. The city would have been locked down if there was evidence of a terrorist at work and the number of dead cops would indicate there was.
Jumping ahead quite a bit because this movie is so stupid a scene-by-scene tear-down would just confuse my readers. Sims hunts down the girls, again using his super hacker. Cassandra saves them again, kills Sims but becomes a blind cripple in the process.
In the denouement. Madame Web is blind and in a wheelchair which her character should be. The girls (who still have families) appear to have moved in with Madame Web and she’s foreseeing them having great careers as superheroines… Which they won’t.
Madame Web is something unique. A superheroine movie without any superheroines. Just to be clear; Spiderwoman, Spider-Woman, and Spider Girl do not gain their spider-related superpowers in this movie. I didn’t think there could be anything more boring than an origin story but there is; an origin story without the fucking origin!
So if you were hoping to see Sydney Sweeney in posing a skintight gimp-suit for more than 1.5 seconds total screen time forget it. This movie couldn’t even bring that to the party.
Was there anything I liked? No, but there were things I didn’t hate. None of the hot girls were coded as lesbians. In fact they all showed a healthy interest in boys. I haven’t seen that in a superhero movie for some time. They were dressed attractively too. There was a modicum of respect for the source material, if not the audience’s IQ. Cassandra’s mother went looking for a magical jungle spider when she was 8.5 months gone because an amniocentesis had determined that her baby would have myasthenia gravis. A woman protecting her child will do anything. I’m cool with that in a superhero movie. Even if an amio in 1973 was damn rare. Rarer still if there is no cause whatsoever to believe that the fetus has a health issue which Cassandra’s mother emphatically states that she doesn’t.
You can tell this project started life right after Spiderman No Way Home when Sony thought they had finally cracked the superhero code. It made sense to mobilize all the characters they had the rights to, which is everybody in the Spiderverse as well as Peter Parker’s enemies.
You can also tell they lost faith in it in mid-pre-production. The script and the budget got cut but not the film they were shooting. It’s not hacked to oblivion like a Disney/Marvel movie. Sure it’s idiotic but it’s also coherent.
Dumb as this movie is, it would have been acceptable as a 1980s pilot for a TV superhero show. Except the girls would have had superpowers by the end of the show.
The movie had a budget of $90 million so it’s certainly not going to bankrupt Sony, but it won’t turn a profit either.
I can also say it’s not as bad as The Marvels or Antman 3. However, unless you have an interest in spider web motifs that is borderline fetishism, then there is no reason to see this movie. That being the case…
The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend Madame Web
