After the ridiculous meme sensation Morbius and the crazy Tom Hardy sequel Venom: Let There Be Carnage, the new film from Sony’s smaller Marvel universe, Madame Web, is now in cinemas. The film with Dakota Johnson (Fifty Shades of Grey) and Sydney Sweeney (Where the Lie Falls) is unlikely to help the superhero franchise get better.
Madame Web is also a Morbius-like disaster that, despite the Dakota Johnson meme hype, probably won’t even achieve the cult trash status of the Jared Leto flop. At least there is one exciting thing about director SJ Clarkson’s film that concerns the villain. Anyone who has always wanted to see how disturbing Spider-Man would be as a ruthless psycho killergets a glimpse of it in Madame Web.
Direction, script, effects: Madame Web is almost a total superhero failure
The film about the Marvel comic character reels off all the origin story clichés that we have been shown countless times in the cinema over the last 20 years. Madame Web not only comes across as completely dusty and out of date in terms of content, but it also looks that way. The CGI effects are almost a joke and are easily surpassed even by unfinished video game technology demos.
There are also wooden dialogues that the stars have to struggle through with sometimes visible disinterest. In terms of staging, every hint of speed, movement and action appears confusing, blurry or cut up in a completely confusing manner. Only Tahar Rahim (A Prophet) as the villain Ezekiel occasionally gives the Marvel blockbuster an oppressive charisma that is consistent with one of the most likeable Marvel superheroes ever.
Madame Web villain becomes Spider-Man in psycho killer mode
The antagonist targets three teenage girls (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor), who kill him in recurring visions as future superheroes. It would be It’s scary enough to watch a man trying to murder three schoolgirls.
Madame Web goes beyond this standard horror movie story, but becomes even more uncomfortable because Ezekiel has Spider-Man-style superpowers after an incident in the Amazon. Although he doesn’t fire nets from his hands. But just like the friendly neighborhood spider, he can crawl up walls and walk upside down along ceilings.
Sony
Ezekiel in a suit in Madame Web
There was a passage in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 that briefly hinted at what a loss of control by Peter Parker would look like. Tobey Maguire’s version of the hero is controlled by the alien symbiote Venom in the controversial scenes and transforms into an anarchic daredevil that many fans at the time laughed at as an emo joke character.
Madame Web takes this approach much further and shows the result when Maguire, Andrew Garfield or Tom Holland in their Marvel roles Fall into psychopathic madness and mutate into unscrupulous killers would.
Cassie Webb’s visions of the future, with Ezekiel as a frightening apparition to which the three teenagers repeatedly fall brutal victims, seem like something from another film. Madame Web only hints at this. For brief moments this leaves Spider-Man villain in slasher mode but flash through what would have been possible with Sony’s latest Marvel low point.