I'm sure her career will be okay, but yeesh
dir: S.J. Clarkson
2024
This is very bad, but, even worse, it’s very pointless.
So bad. How did they trick people into being in this? Did anyone think this was going to be a ticket to stardom and big cash payouts? Well, I’m sure they all got paid very well, but, yeesh, this is woeful.
Madame Web exists in this strange alternate Spider-Man world that doesn’t have Spider-Man in it. There are four movies now in this alternate setting, I think? All four are pretty shitty. Moebius I think exists, if I didn’t hallucinate it, as a very stupid movie, as do two Venom movies, which are also stupid and painful.
And now this. This is an origin story for some hero, I think, who’s blind and in a wheelchair. But before that ‘hilarious’ ending, it’s about characters whose names I’m not even going to use, because it’s too fucking stupid.
So I will refer at least to the actors in this. Dakota Johnson gets a lot of flack for not being much of an actor, or for being a nepo baby (a foot in the door and so much more), but I think that’s really unfair. I’ve never seen nor will I ever see those movies based on the 50 Shades of Grey books, because life is way too short, but I have seen her in a few films where she’s been great. She was great in The High Note, in Cha Cha Real Smooth, and in The Lost Daughter a couple of years ago, so that’s at least three solid performances I can point to.
I can’t blame her for the indifferent work she puts in here, but it really feels like she has no idea why she’s here, and can’t wait to get off set. And this script, ye gods, how fucking pointless.
You see, in nature, there’s a magical spider somewhere in a jungle. Evolution has resulted in a spider with a bite so powerful that it gives people superpowers. Imagine that, as a defense mechanism, as something adaptation has brought about to maximise your species’ survivability. You, a small spider from a lineage of small spiders, have your genes change in such a way that your bite, whose purpose is to paralyse / liquefy prey, and fend off predators, instead gives your prey and predators superpowers! How awesome is that? Way to go, little spider.
I mean, is it really any less absurd than being bitten by a radioactive spider, like Peter Parker, or by a genetically engineered one and getting your powers, like Miles Morales?
It’s either all plausible or all fucking ridiculous – it’s churlish to say one’s valid and the other isn’t. After all, all of it, the good and the bad, it’s all made up shit in the end.
In this flick our heroine gets her powers when her mother, working in the jungles of Peru, is mostly killed by a jerk who then absconds with the magic spider. The mum, heavily pregnant, is bitten by magic spiders before she gives birth, and then dies, in the way that all Republicans wish women would die just after giving birth to their (male) progeny in the States.
That baby grows up to be Cassandra Webb, played by Dakota Johnson, who therefore never knew her mother, and is sad about it. The majority of the flick I think is set in the early 2000s, when Cassandra is about 30, and works as a paramedic. There are a lot of scenes of her driving recklessly, delivering terrible exposition with the appropriate level of boredom, and being diligent about her job yet doesn’t give a fuck about the people whose lives she’s trying to save. And then she dies, trying to save someone, and then is resuscitated, and starts seeing The Future!
Remember how I said her mother was killed by some guy in a jungle? That guy, Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), would probably have to be about sixty now, in the film’s present, but what he is, is a Spider-Man without Spider-Man’s powers who basically doesn’t help anyone. In the style of selfish people in movies, he is very rich, but it’s not clear why. He has the magic spider, in a terrarium, but it’s unclear why having a magic spider in a terrarium equals big dollars in the bank. He has a Spider-Man-like suit, but doesn’t sling webs, or make funny quips, or do much of anything other than grunt about his need to kill some women.
He, like Cassie, sporadically sees scenes from the future. He sees that, in the future, a trio of Spider-Women will beat the absolute shit out of him, resulting in him no longer living his pointless existence. So, using the help of a terribly wasted Zosia Mamet as some hacker person who looks at screens all day long, he tracks down three women to kill them.
What a coincidence, they all randomly happen to be at a train station! And Cassie is there too! Because she had partial visions of things that could happen, and she doesn’t want these teenagers to die. I mean, no-one should want teenagers to die, and should do everything they can to stop such a thing from happening.
The powers she has are pretty terrible at actually helping anyone, but it’s really convenient that they guide her to where she needs to be in order to just be there, or at the last second pull people out of danger, or out of the villain’s line of sight.
With the proliferation of Spider-Man adjacent stuff, there is the clear intention to follow interesting detours and deviate from the known stuff of the first, I dunno, 20 Spider-Man movies by exploring all the wild and woolly people within the comics, but it’s hard, man, it’s just real hard.
To care, that is. The three teenagers that will be Spider people aren’t Spider people yet. They’re just dull teenagers. My favourite, in that I hated it so much I would have preferred spider venom to drip into my eyes than ever watch it again, scene involves the teenagers being at a diner in the middle of nowhere. They’re trying to lay low. But when one of them sees some teenage boys at a distant table, who look like football players, I guess, they decide to dance on the table for the boys’ amusement.
I know that the words I’ve written don’t sound too alien or outlandish, but I’m not conveying just how fucking weird and out of nowhere any of that is. The only thing stranger would have been, in anticipation of the weird anti-Spider-Man coming to kill them, if they’d put on avocado onesies and started reciting lines from the Tom Stoppard play Rosenrcrantz and Gildenstern are Dead just for shits and giggles.
I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve been at a diner and teenage girls spontaneously jump up onto my table and slowly gyrate in their mini-skirts while reciting “We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke.”
Yes, yes, give me more.
The flick has been mocked and pilloried for being terrible, yes, and for having terrible exposition and dialogue, and at the Oscars a few days ago stand up comedian John Mulaney even used a line of dialogue from this film to highlight the importance of sound in movies. The line was “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders just before she died.”
Words can seem harmless, and inert on a page, just lying there, not doing much. But you really have to hear these words spoken by actors who clearly don’t care at all in order to marvel at just how fucking terrible these words are coming out of people’s faces.
So many terrible choices, so much terrible noises. I can’t even make the argument that the action, in what was probably intended to be an action movie, could save such a fiasco, because adding insult and salt to injury and wounds, the action is uniformly awful, with terrible special effects that look cheap and janky, yet probably still cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
And ultimately it’s not even an origin story for how a hero got her powers or her groove back; it’s a story about how a person ended up blind and in a wheelchair.
How…thrilling. And it’s all ultimately a pre-cursor to another film that is never going to get made.
Because there’s absolutely no way Dakota Johnson or Sydney Sweeney, who plays one of the baby Spider-Women, are ever going to be coaxed back to play these characters again. I’m sure the rest of the nobodies would come back in a heartbeat for further non-adventures, but Adam Scott probably has better things to do that play Uncle Ben to some future Peter Parker.
One day, with his dying breath, he’ll get to say “With great paydays, we’ll go crazy with the strippers and the cocaine”, which will justify all these shenanigans and tomfoolery.
Ew. How fucking pointless.
2 times I could not believe how relentlessly mediocre it aspired to be out of 10
--
“When you take on the responsibility, great power will come.” – ugh make it stop I’m begging you - Madame Web
- 139 reads