Action sci-fi Madame Web review: With great power comes startling mediocrity

The cast of superhero film Madame Web, at its Los Angeles premiere on February 13, 2024. (Image via X/@MadameWeb)

Marvel’s first entrée of 2024 is so tepid, messy and uninspiring, it leaves your belly aching out of dread for whatever the rest of the plate has to offer. This isn’t a Marvel in-house production per se, but this standalone origin story of a character that remains unrefined even after the climax, feels like an arrow shot in the starry blindness of unlimited cache and cash. When you’ve practically ruled the box-office for a decade, chances are you’ll eventually make the kind of seat-fillers that spring neither surprises nor sensations remotely concerned with human emotion. Madame Web feels so lethargic in its conception and poorer still in execution that it feels almost embarrassing to consider it alongside the innovative spirit of the Spiderverse films.

The year is 2003, and Cassandra Web played by a somewhat committed Dakota Johnson is an ambulance driver in New York, suddenly stricken by this gift of visualising accidents before they happen. Unlike Final Destination, though, this power has been prefaced by an incident in some random Amazonian forest, 30 years prior, when Web’s mother, tracking down a unique species of spider, is betrayed and subsequently murdered by her colleague Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim). Before she dies, though, Web’s mother is bitten by the weird spider, the unspecified powers of which are transferred to the surviving child. Ezekiel has some sort of inexplicable accident of his own while bringing the specimens back home with him. Years down the line, the two collide with bizarrely similar but wholly undefined powers, in a film that can’t quite make up its mind about when to punch and when to hold.

Dakota Johnson plays Cassandra Web in Madame Web, made by Sony and stamped by Marvel. (Image via X/@MadameWeb

Comic book worlds are understandably churlish about origin stories, and they regularly make of hard science, the kind of mushy dough that feels exhilarating in instantly fried yet vapid form. Of course, a spider confers its powers to humans here but beyond the ‘spidey sense’, it’s hard to tell what exactly makes Web interesting or even noticeable, beyond this ability to time things better than a fortune cookie.

Web’s character as a paramedic on the frontlines of crumbling healthcare infrastructure could have been crucially written into the skeleton of the character, and yet you get a person bereft of any soul or conflict other than this recurring sense of ‘déjà vu’. “I can see the future,” she says in a scene, crafted to extract humour without realising how it obscures a personality too thin and uninspiring to even care for. After a point, you aren’t even interested.

Web and Ezekiel’s confrontation is anchored by three teenagers, one of whom is played by the emerging superstar Sydney Sweeney. The plot device here is confusion, at both the creative and the narrative level. Ezekiel has, for unexplained reasons, foreseen these young girls annihilating him in the distant future. His plan of action is to kill them before, you know, vice versa.

It’s hard to tell exactly where the algorithmic pattern for projections depart for the two quarrelling protagonists here, but it’s certainly amusing to see two people capable of seeing the future (selective lengths, mind you), fight to prevent it from happening. On some level, it is probably an intriguing idea, that if it were bedecked with humour, urgent action and some narrative sophistication, could have elicited something acceptable if not remarkable.

Except Madame Web is tedious to the point that you can’t help but root for the three teenagers to mutinously overthrow the boomers fighting over them, and turn this into something edgier and maybe less serious than it needs to be. Even Britney Spears’ iconic ‘Toxic’ plays to an astoundingly sluggish action sequence. For a better version, do check the way Fargo used the same track in its latest season.

Directed by S.J. Clarkson, Madame Web at least does the unenviable job of pitting a bunch of women against a forgettable baddie. Somehow, Marvel’s female led films have of late, carried the whiff of indiscipline and maybe even disenchantment. For a studio that has ruthlessly commanded the box-office for a decade, this apathy feels strange but also indicative of a wider problem.

Even though this production isn’t exactly a Marvel in-house creation (Sony took the lead on this one), the former’s banner precedes the first cut to action. That must mean something, if not ingenuity then at least basic graphic quality in cinema we’ve come to expect technical grandeur from. Instead the CGI is so lazily collated, the set design so embarrassingly plain and the script so starved of inspiration, you wonder if anyone ever picked up a phone to call across creative teams, to sort of, own the ineptitude of it all.

Fatigue or no fatigue, Madame Web isn’t even campy or bad enough to be curiously gutsy and good in the way that some of those Batman films were in the '90s. To try and remember any of it after you’ve walked out of the theatre, would be an actual superpower.