I walked into Madame Web fully aware that since its release on Valentine’s Day in some key markets around the world, the film had been universally panned, with most reviewers and viewers pulling no punches in labelling it as everything from an “embarrassing botch-up” to “the worst film in comic-book history”. But how bad can a film get, I wondered and thought of giving it a go, deciding that I would not fall prey to cliches in my description of what is the fourth film in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (SSU).

Now having watched it, I can safely say that Madame Web is not as bad as you have heard it to be. It is much, much worse. A tangled mess from start to finish — and that is putting it very politely — the film lacks both bite and wit, is stuffed with some of the most lame dialogues heard on screen in the recent past and is, without a doubt, an addition to the pantheon of worst comic-book adaptations, sitting right up there with Catwoman and Morbius.

This isn’t much of a surprise considering that both Morbius and Madame Web hail from the writing team of Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless. Sloppily created, filmed without vision and direction and awkwardly acted, Madame Web is a boring cringe-fest that reeks of nothing but a project only mounted to be a soulless cash grab.

The film, the longest in the SSU in terms of runtime, is an origin story. Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson), a New York paramedic, is suddenly faced with the realisation that she has clairvoyant powers. Her visions — which take her to her past — compel her to embark on a journey to save three young women (played by Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O’Connor and Isabela Merced) and their future from a dangerous adversary (played by Tahar Rahim).

Effortlessly falling into the category of scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel cinema, Madame Web is as contrived and cliched as it gets and is representative of the extreme fatigue that has crept into the superhero genre. It is badly shot and edited, with director S.J. Clarkson along with cinematographer Maura Fiore and editor Leigh Folsom, attempting to create a pacy visual quagmire to mirror the web of confused thoughts going through Cassandra/ Madame Web’s mind. The result is the equivalent of a train wreck, plunging the viewer deeper and deeper into a dark abyss where a meaningless plot competes with dry, cardboard cutout characters and situations that are both incomprehensible and clunky. This is superhero filmmaking at its worst and is not even smart or self-aware enough to qualify as campy fun.

The film is also extremely expository with almost every character eating up valuable screen time to talk about their sketchy backgrounds, their existential crises and their unfulfilled desires. The most unsettling thing about this film is its Pepsi product placement with the beverage giant popping up awkwardly in the unlikeliest of places.

In Madame Web, things move at breakneck speed — as part of its memo of throwing everything at the audience so that one scarcely has time to think — the story is half-baked and many of its moments are unintentionally hilarious. The film has a distinct feminine/ teenage energy but fails to harness that at all.

What also doesn’t help the film is Dakota Johnson’s insipid portrayal of the character, her acting traversing the range of ‘50 shades’ of mediocrity. The same goes for Tahar Rahim who was so compelling as Charles Sobhraj in Netflix’s The Serpent but ends up being laughably bad in this film. The only one who comes out of this below-average exercise with some sort of dignity still intact is Emma Roberts who plays Mary Parker, the future mother of Peter Parker aka Spider-Man.

To sum up, Madame Web embodies the pitfalls of mainstream superhero cinema — films not driven by story and character but seemingly fuelled by studio mandates and franchise considerations. For many of us, the superhero genre died with Iron Man in Avengers: End Game. Most of what has followed — barring a few — has only added to the agony. Madame Web sits at the top of that list.

Priyanka Roy
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