![]() Even a brief sojourn back in the Amazon doesn’t lead to anything more interesting than a flashback to the movie’s bizarre opening scene. Almost all of them boil down to a rote, slow-speed car chase. Clarkson ( Jessica Jones) can’t find any life for her action scenes at all. Given how many movies nowadays are just Trojan Horses for future films, that could almost be excusable, if any of this post-credits-tease-in-movie-form were more interesting to watch. It’s a trailer for the excitement to come someday, assuming fans love (and pay for) this movie enough for it to get a sequel or two. Madame Web, it seems, is nothing more than a craven attempt at inflating a cinematic superhero universe. They don’t get their powers in this movie, they don’t find out they’ll one day be heroes, they don’t even fight anyone. When the three women line up for a group hero shot in Ezekiel’s dream, just after pushing him out a window, they’re practically a poster for a hypothetical Spider-Girls movie.īut Ezekiel’s dream sequence near the beginning of the movie and a brief vision from Cassie at the end of the movie are all we see of these three fresh heroes. These three “heroes” reveal Madame Web’s real cynicism: The whole movie is just a backdoor pilot. In our glimpse of this dream, we get to see that of course the three women are Anya, Julia, and Mattie, all dressed as Spider-Woman variants from the Marvel comics. The second thing we learn is that he has had a dream since the night he got his powers that three women who also have spider powers will one day kill him, so he’s made it his life’s mission to kill them first. This is one of exactly two things we learn about him in the entire movie. Ezekiel seems to have Spider-Man powers, which he gained by murdering Cassie’s mom in the Amazon and stealing her special spider. But Madame Web doesn’t seem to have any interest in any of them, never cutting to get their reactions to anything, and rarely giving their jokes enough time to breathe or to let the audience laugh.įor all the wasted potential of Madame Web’s heroes, the movie’s biggest issue is its villain, Ezekiel Sims, played by Tahar Rahim in an astoundingly awful performance from an otherwise gifted actor. Merced was surprisingly fun as live-action Dora the Explorer, O’Connor is one of the best parts of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and Sweeney is a full-on movie star. There are also flashes of promise from the trio of young women Cassie’s trying to save, but the movie somehow manages to squander the group’s remarkable collective charisma. Despite her press-tour uncertainty about the movie, she is far and away the brightest spot in Madame Web - at least when she isn’t buried under its wooden dialogue. While they’re often filmed in confusing ways, edited together too quickly for viewers to really track, and lacking a consistent enough visual language to be clearly legible, they’re saved almost entirely by Johnson, who reacts to these brief breaks from the fourth dimension with quixotic looks and genuinely hilarious sarcasm. Image: Sony PicturesĬassie’s flashes forward in time are the most complicated part of Madame Web, and surprisingly, its most fun moments, too. Eventually, this power leads her to save the lives of three girls, Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced), and Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor), from a strange man that she foresees trying to kill them. Yes, that Ben.Īfter literally dying one day during a call to save someone from a traffic accident, Cassie suddenly gains the power to see an indeterminate length of time into the future. The movie then cuts forward to 2003, when Cassie is a paramedic in New York City, working with her best friend Ben Parker (Adam Scott). After a predictable betrayal, Cassie’s mom ends up at death’s door when a tribe of spider-people (yes, there are spider-people in the Amazon rainforest) save her baby’s life using special venom from a rare super-spider. ![]() We discover in the movie’s 1970s-set opening that Cassie’s mom researched spiders in the Amazon while pregnant with Cassie. ![]() Madame Web, as it turns out, is actually a woman named Cassie Web (Johnson). Far from just the cash-in that it seemed like a few years ago when this movie headlined by an F-tier superhero was first announced, Sony’s latest Marvel offshoot is a two-hour post-credits scene, made only intermittently tolerable by Dakota Johnson’s underappreciated knack for comedy. Madame Web might be the most shameless superhero movie of all time.
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