Trailers are designed to stir up excitement, the amuse-bouche that whets your appetite for the three-course meal. Occasionally, the oldest marketing trick in the book backfires. When Sony dropped a sneak peek at Madame Web, the newest addition to the company’s roster of Spider-Man–related films and another of their corporate crossovers with the good folks at Marvel Studios, the reaction was… not exactly what they hoped for. The same fans they were hoping to get riled up about a batch of fresh Spidey-adjacent characters began to mock the clip, ripping into everything from Dakota Johnson‘s extremely decaf line readings to the curiously low-rent look of the visuals. One deadpan line of dialogue — “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders, right before she died” — became a meme in all the wrong ways. Blood was in the water now, and the amuse-bouche had somehow become chum.
Some of the merciless shit-talking could be chalked up to old-fashioned fanboy misogyny, with online trolls ready to tear apart anything even remotely associated with lady superheroes. The fact that the movie revolved around one of the more obscure players in the Spiderverse didn’t help, making it feel as if Sony was scraping just above the bottom of the barrel. And the odd mix of hyperventilating crash-bang-boom business and a lack of wattage from the cast made everything feel like it was one step away from parody — an SNL fake trailer disguised as a real one. It pinned a “Kick Me” sign on the film’s back, which felt blatantly unfair. Yes, the teaser wasn’t selling this would-be blockbuster well. But wait until you see the thing until you make a final judgement call, people.
Well, having now seen this tangled-up I.P. gossamer first-hand, we can say that Madame Web isn’t as bad as its somewhat botched promotional campaign might suggest. It is, in fact, way worse. A genuine Chernobyl-level disaster that seems to get exponentially more radioactive as it goes along, this detour to one of the dustier corners of Marvel’s content farm is a dead-end from start to finish. It is the Cats: The Movie of superhero movies. Not a single decision seems of sound mind. Not a single performance feels in sync with the material. Not a single line reading feels as if it hasn’t somehow been magically auto-tuned to subtract emotion and/or inflection. The sole amazing factor of this Spider-spinoff is that someone, somewhere signed off on actually releasing it.
All of which boggles the mind, because it isn’t like they skimped on bringing real talent onboard. Johnson, the A-lister cast as paramedic-turned-precognitive matron Cassie Webb — it’s short for Cassandra, because of course — has gone from being the 50 Shades of Grey ingénue to a major actor. (See: A Bigger Splash, Suspiria, The Lost Daughter, Persuasion.) Sydney Sweeney is a rising star who seems to keep ascending higher and higher; she’s one of three twentysomethings cast as teens (the other two are Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor) who are mysteriously drawn together with Webb and will become a trio of future Spider-Women. Ever since he broke out with the 2009 French prison drama A Prophet, Tahar Rahim has demonstrated screen presence to spare, and you’d think he’d nail a deliriously evil villain like the power-mad Ezekiel Sims. Adam Scott, Emma Roberts, Mike Epps, Zosia Mamet and Halt and Catch Fire‘s Kerry Bishé drop by as well. Director S.J. Clarkson’s resume reads like Prestige TV 101, having helmed episodes of Succession, Orange Is the New Black, Dexter, Jessica Jones and a prequel pilot for Game of Thrones.
And yet, from the moment that the spirit-of-’73 preamble in the Peruvian Amazon forces Bishé’s Constance Webb to monotonously recite stats about a rare arachnid “whose peptides can cure hundreds of diseases,” you can tell something seems off. It only gets worse when Rahim, already one mustache-twirl away from tying a damsel to railroad tracks, begins musing aloud about “Las Arañas,” the region’s “spider-men” who whiz across treetops. These super-powered strangers happen to be real, and deliver Cassie when her wounded Mom dies. By the time we fast-forward to NYC circa 2003, when Johnson’s now-grown Cassie is an EMT alongside Scott’s Ben Parker and she begins shrieking out orders with the enthusiasm of a subway announcer, there’s already the overwhelming smell of a turkey wafting into your nose.
(We’d like to pause for a second to single out the surname of Adam Scott’s character, note that his sister Mary is pregnant — though she hasn’t disclosed the baby’s name yet — and reflect that while he has no desire to be a dad, he’s very much looking forward to being “Uncle Ben” in the kid’s life. WINK, NUDGE, WINK.)
Celeste O’Connor, Dakota Johnson, Isabela Merced, and Sydney Sweeney in ‘Madame Web.’
Sony Pictures
Then the trinity of hellraising skate-rat Mattie Fanklin (O’Connor), mousy goody-two-shoes Julia Cornwall (Sweeney) and characteristic-apparently-to-be-decided-later Anya Corazon (Merced) come into the picture, and not even the infusion of youth and promise of eventual consumed heroics can defibrillate this thing to life. The same goes for Rahim’s bad guy crawling the walls in an all-black Spidey suit, which doesn’t really jibe with any sort of cinematic-universe timeline to be honest, but why get hung up on details? As for Webb’s powers, she can see unprompted visions of the future ranging from 30 seconds to five minutes ahead of schedule, which the movie keeps rendering via jittery repeats of a D.O.A. scene you’ve just suffered through once. Such intense bouts of déjà vu are matched only by the feeling of disbelief happening on the other side of the screen.
“The best thing about the future is — it hasn’t happened yet,” someone intones near the end of Madame Web, and indeed, you look forward to a future in which this film’s end credits (which, spoiler alert, are sans stinger scenes previewing coming-soon plot points; even Sony was like, yeah, enough of this already) are in your rearview mirror and gone from your memory. Or an alternate world years from now in which this unintentional comedy of intellectual-property errors has been ret-conned into a sort of cult camp classic — a Showgirls of comic-book cinema. Until then, you’re left with a present in which you’re compelled to cringe for two hours, pretend none of this ever happened, and ruefully say the words you’d never imagine uttering: “Come back, Morbius, all is forgiven.”
