Director – S.J. Clarkson, Screenplay – S.J. Clarkson, Claire Parker, Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless, Story – Kerem Sanga, Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless, Based on the Marvel Comics Character Created by Dennis O’Neil & John Romita Jr, Producer – Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Photography – Mauro Fiore, Music – Johan Søderqvist, Visual Effects Supervisor – Michael Brazelton, Visual Effects – beloFX (Supervisor – Oliver Atherton), Digital Domain (Supervisor – Scott Edelstein), Industrial Light and Magic, Instinctual (Supervisor – Alan Latteri), One of Us (Supervisor – Ola Pellerud Hamletsen), Outpost VFX (Supervisor – Tom Trindade) & Territory Studio, Special Effects Supervisor – Jeremy Hays, Production Design – Ethan Tobman. Production Company – Sony/Marvel/di Bonaventura Pictures/TSG Entertainment.
Cast
Dakota Johnson (Cassandra Webb), Sydney Sweeney (Julia Cornwall), Isabella Merced (Anya Corazon), Celeste O’Connor (Mattie Franklin), Tahar Rahim (Ezekiel Sims), Adam Scott (Ben Parker), Emma Roberts (Mary Parker), Kerry Bishé (Constance Webb), Mike Epps (O’Neil), Zosia Mamet (Amaria), Jose Maria Yazpik (Santiago)
Plot
In 1973, the pregnant Constance Webb travels into the Amazonian Peru in search of a rare breed of spider but is betrayed and shot by her colleague Ezekiel Sims who takes the spider. New York City, 2003. Constance’s now-grown daughter Cassandra works as a paramedic. Cassandra begins to have flashes of things happening and realises that she is experiencing events before they happen and has the power to change them. While riding on the subway, she sees a man killing three teenage girls. The man is none other than Sims who has powers as a result of the spider and is haunted by visions that the three girls will unite against him. Cassandra flees with the three girls, Julia Cornwall, Mattie Franklin and Anya Corazon, in a stolen taxi while hunted by authorities and Sims who has tapped all surveillance system in an effort to locate and kill them.
Marvel Comics have had massive success with their superhero films since 2008, bringing them together on screen in a massive shared continuity (the Marvel Cinematic Universe or MCU). There have been several Marvel superhero films that exist outside of that. The rights to Spider-Man are held over at Sony who first put him through the Sam Raimi directed and Tobey Maguire starring trilogy Spider-Man (2002), Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007), which were a huge success that predated and led to the formation of the MCU. After Raimi and Maguire bowed out, Sony attempted a reboot starring Andrew Garfield with The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014). These were less successful so Sony rebooted Spider-Man a third time with Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019) and Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) starring Tom Holland. This time they conducted the smart move of making a deal that allowed Holland’s Spider-Man to cross over into the MCU in Captain America: Civil War (2016), Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019).
Aside from its Spider-Man films, Sony has also sought to create a series of spinoffs using Spider-Man characters to create their own mini-shared universe. They had reasonable success with the film based on the Spider-Man villain Venom (2018) and the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) featuring alternate versions of Spider-Man. Both of these spawned sequels with Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021) and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), while they tried the same with other Spider-Man characters with Morbius (2022), Madame Web here and the upcoming Kraven the Hunter (2024). Madame Web does make some claim to tying up to the rest of Marvel continuity – aside from more spidery antics, Adam Scott plays Ben Parker, who should in theory become Peter Parker’s murdered uncle, while Celeste O’Connor refers to her Uncle Jonah (Jameson).
Madame Web is the first of these Sony spinoffs not based on a character who has their own comic-book. Madame Web first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man #210 (1980). The character there is radically different to the one on screen – the comic-book Cassandra Web is blind and paralysed and an old woman. She sits in a web-like structure and is able to use her clairvoyant and psychic powers to reach out and affect events. We only ever get some intimation of that at the very end of the film, otherwise the role is played by the very mobile, 34 year-old Dakota Johnson. The film also winds in other characters from Spider-Man comic-book continuity including the villain Ezekiel Sims, while Julia Cornwall and Mattie Franklin are two of the incarnations of Spider-Woman and Anya Corazon becomes Spider-Girl.
Dakota Johnson as Cassandra Webb
S.J. Clarkson has been a director in British and late US television since the early 2000s. (Despite a thorough internet scouring, nobody seems to have any idea what the initials S.J. stand for). She has worked on numerous British shows including Eastenders (1985- ), Casualty (1986 – ), Doctors (2000- ), Life on Mars (2006-7) and Whitechapel (2009-13), along with US shows such as Heroes (2006-10) and Dexter (2006-13), while she had previously ventured into Marvel Comics with episodes of the tv series Jessica Jones (2015-9) and The Defenders (2017), among many others. Madame Web is Clarkson’s feature-film directorial debut, although back in 2018 she had been announced as director of the fourth Star Trek reboot film, which never emerged.
The script comes from the writing team of Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, who have an astonishing run of box-office flops with Dracula Untold (2014), The Last Witch Hunter (2015), Gods of Egypt (2016), Power Rangers (2017) and Morbius to their name such that it baffles me that they continue to keep getting work. However, I was prepared to forgive them somewhat as they were showrunners on the quite good Lost in Space (2018-21) reboot.
Madame Web received some of the worst reviews of any Marvel film – Rolling Stone called it “the Cats (2019) of superhero films” – while earning the lowest box-office of any of Sony’s Spider-Man films. It currently sits at No 13 on Rotten Tomatoes list of The Worst Superhero Films of All Time, beaten only by Fantastic Four (2015) and Elektra (2005). Previews were not held for critics – always sign of a lack of faith from the distributor. Part of this may be that Marvel, the MCU and superhero movies in general seem to be past their prime – the MCU has produced a string of dogs this side of the 2020s, while the DCEU films (a number of which are quite good) have been box-office flops. Outside of the Spider-Man/Spider-Verse, the Sony Spider-Man spinoffs have all been poorly regarded as well. That said, as bad films go, Madame Web still gets healthy competition from The Marvels (2023), the single worst effort put out by the MCU, and Venom: Let There Be Carnage, the worst film made under the Sony banner IMHO, while the worst work to ever be released based on a Marvel superhero is Spiderman and the Dragon’s Challenge (1980).
(l to r) Anya Corazon (Isabella Merced), Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson), Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney) and Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor)
I went into Madame Web with the hope that it might have been just an okay film suffering from bad fan word of mouth. Part of the problem immediately evident from the outset is that it is a superhero film that seems to avoid the superhero label, Despite the release of posters featuring the characters in costume, the film dispenses with any kind of capes and superheroes. All we ever get are ultra-brief glimpses of the three girls in costume in Tahar Rahim’s dream and in the last shot of the film, while Tahar Rahim’s does appear in a spidery-like costume while in action. Aside from that, this is a mundane work about a quartet of girls propelled into the midst of superheroic action happening around them. As such, it all feels like an overlong origin story where the entire film (at 1 hour and 56 minutes) acts as preamble to the emergence all-girl superhero team at the end – even then, nobody other than Dakota Johnson does anything to indicate why we should regard them as superheroines, the rest of the characters are no more than bystanders caught in the action.
The other problem that the film has is that the conception of Madame Web is utterly uncinematic. We have a super-heroine whose sole superpower is being able to see events before they happen and prevent them. This is not the stuff of capes, secret identities and epic battles with super-villains and intergalactic threats. It makes Madame Web no more than akin to a tv series like The Dead Zone (2002-7), Ghost Whisperer (2005-10) or Medium (2005-11), all of which are works about someone with clairvoyant powers solving/preventing mundane crimes, not the stuff of superheroics.
Now there is a possibility that this could have worked. I could have seen Madame Web as one of the Marvel tv series such as The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021- ), Hawkeye (2021), Loki (2021- ), WandaVision (2021), Moon Knight (2022- ), Ms Marvel (2022) or She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (2022- ), where Marvel have regarded these as experiments for off-the-beaten track ideas that were not the right fit for being made as full cinematic films. Alas, none of the film ever gets that interesting,
The film is further hampered by some bad plotting and direction, which may well have been a result of the chaos of the production, which included script changes on the day of shooting. Watching Dakota Johnson’s visions of events before they happen are often confusing – there is often no dividing line between vision and happening, leaving you with no clue which is the real event. Furthermore, the script’s motivating issues are vague. Tahar Rahim pursues the three girls obsessively because he has a vision they might one day be a threat of some type. Or the end where Dakota Johnson settles in as den mother to three girls with absentee parents apparently with her abducting them, stealing two vehicles and the fact that they might actually have parents and guardians of their own simply having been forgotten by authorities.
