Web Of Lameness

The question everyone wants to know about Madame Web, whether it suckers them into finding out for themselves or not, is “does the film’s idiocy live up to the pretend meme hype?” The answer is, unexcitingly, yes and no. Is it funny for the wrong reasons? Oh definitely. It’s delicious to see the “self aware” and competence fetishist Marvel brand have this little of an idea where its pitches are landing. People with any sense of irony will chuckle bemusedly at how exactly this is meant to exhilarate while the “consoomers” it pitches will doze. Does this make it actually fun? Well despite the deserved schadenfreude, it’s still so dull I struggled to remember even its blunders five minutes later. In typical faux-adult superhero fashion, Madame Web mutes its emotional swings in an effort to hedge its bets. It tries to stave off cringe with mealymouthedness. 

MADAME WEB ★ (1/5 stars)
Directed by: S.J. Clarkson
Written by: Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, Claire Parker
Starring: Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor, Adam Scott, Tahar Rahim, Emma Roberts, Zosia Mamet
Running time: 117 mins

The other main question is about Dakota Johnson, and how her thinly veiled disdain for the picture squares with her work within. Johnson, queen of the realistic pithy, uneasy “welp, so that just happened” reaction, here enters the franchise that ruined that very sarcasm. CAN SHE SAVE IT? Well…she certainly does all she can to try. The film may not be great, or ever good, but the difference is quite apparent. She can’t make her lines funny or realistic, but she underplays the obvious, asinine material into its most inconspicuous self.

It recalls the unheralded brilliance of her titanic, earth-shattering Fifty Shades of Grey performance, in which she underpins a terrified and thoroughly enriched source material tonal shift, more than it does her campy clowning in its sequels. She seems to even farm some trademark awkwardness from the thoroughly thudding script, which again, she just can’t obscure. Just like on her hilarious, scorched-earth irony-courting press tour, she doesn’t seem to know how to feel.

The third and final piece of the Meme equation is Sydney Sweeney. While she does wear thigh-high socks and a miniskirt for most of the runtime, it seems incredibly misguided to cast Sweendog as a teenage nerd. Not just because she’s clearly not 15 years younger than Dakota, not just because she’s wooden and bland in the role, but because, um well, making her character a minor seems to compromise the momentum of her recent success as a sex symbol. Since personally I don’t get the appeal, I guess I can’t complain about any guilt this might engender among her horny throng of parasocial suitors, but o ye of downwards wandering eye, consider this a warning!

Marvel, basically since its inception, has pretended its films occupy a secondary genre, as if its soullessly Big apocalyptic action doesn’t swallow all. Cinema-disinterested Marvel fans find themselves sadly fooled at each turn, insisting its Spidermans are “80s Teen Movies”, Captain Americas “Espionage Thrillers”, Guardians of the Galaxy some frightening excuse for Buckaroo Banzai-esque termitic space opera. Madame Web, for its part, is an early-Nolan Time Crimes “mindbender”, just without the novel editing, the high concept, or indeed anything mindbending in the slightest. A good 70 percent of the film is a small-scale story with ample room to breathe a la Cassavetes or at least Sean Baker, (hell, Rian Johnson’s Looper would certainly do) bedeviled instead by the expected nudging, intelligence-insulting crosscut rhythm. Gotta remind the audience of Action Momentum every two minutes to avoid boredom! There’s no way to engage them outside of simple jostling. 

The art-devouring overlords at Marvel have infinite power to hamstring a director, so it’s tough to give Madame Web’s S.J. Clarkson blame or credit for anything. There are some recurring shot setups, most noticeably oscillating long takes centered on a (semi-out of character?) confused Dakota. But overall, as usual, Marvel edits for movement of all costs, sacrificing the reasons the camera might move in the first place. The enervating half-measure “grown up! realist” -x-saturated brights Marvel look is intact and more busted than ever. On paper, the workaday paramedic, diner and hotel scenes are by all rights modest, making the invasions by space-destroying cropping and digitally airbrushed color temperature violations, which are egregious to the point they’d shame a disinterested supermarket bagboy, completely baffling.” Yet all that pales in comparison to the fact that they have entirely (and poorly) ADRed antagonist Tahar Rahim’s dialogue, in the most jarring technical failure of the film. 

Seeing Zosia Mamet (Shoshana of HBO’s Girls infamy), attempt to play straight the antagonist’s hacker-secretary sidekick, a background role with no meat on the bone whatsoever, in addition to Marvel attempting to appear anti-establishment in referencing the Edward Snowden scandal (her character deploys 2003 proto NSA surveillance tech to rival Madame Web’s clairvoyance) is the funniest part of an often unintentionally funny film. While certainly more amusing than aggravating, Troll 2 or Cats this is sadly not. But while it’s not so-bad-it’s-good classic, I’d be lying if I said my time and money felt wasted.