Madame Web review – Marvel’s junky spin-off is a tangled mess

It was an inevitable collapse after a reign of such unwarranted length and unparalleled indulgence, superhero movies totalling eight a year during the 2010s, a lucrative yet tiresome stronghold. There were brief highlights within the flurry but such lazy overreliance left little room for other blockbuster genres to flourish and led studios to scrape barrels, giving us more and more of something we’d ultimately had enough of. Last year saw an overwhelming rejection (The Flash, Shazam 2, The Marvels, Ant-Man 3, Aquaman 2 all underperforming) and now the fallout, the first of the year doubling up as a Powerpoint presentation on what went wrong and how not to fix it.

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Developed back in 2019, given a green light in 2020, filmed during 2022 and then allegedly undergoing reshoots last year, Madame Web was envisioned as a way to extend Marvel and Sony’s Spider-Man universe: a business, if not creative, sense decision after the surprise success of both Venom and Into the Spider-Verse in 2018. An elderly clairvoyant known in the comics for assisting Spider-Man is now turned into a young paramedic, played by Dakota Johnson, who doesn’t even know that Spider-Man exists, in a film desperate to pretend that it’s something it isn’t. Such confusion was on display in the launch of last year’s trailer, immediately going viral for its laughably unsure tone, convoluted plot and checked-out leading lady. Grimly aware of the sea shift, it’s now being referred to as a gritty suspense thriller in press materials with Johnson insisting during press that it’s a standalone movie in its own standalone universe.

The tangled mess that has all created will surely lead to a fascinating oral history years later but for now, with everyone involved fearfully and contractually insisting that the finished product is exactly as intended, all we have is a 110-minute head-scratcher, a baffling string of question marks that remain unanswered. A clumsy opener set in 1970s Peru is our first red flag, junkily directed and shoddily written, setting up our heroine’s absurd backstory which has something to do with spiders as well as spider-people. Thirty years later, she’s a paramedic working alongside Ben Parker (Adam Scott), also known to most as Peter Parker’s uncle, except for in this movie, or at least this version, with all references to Spider-Man scrubbed from the end-product. After a near-death experience she discovers that she can briefly see into the future which allows her to save the lives of three teenagers (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor) being targeted by a madman who also has ties to her past.

With a script written by four people, including its director, SJ Clarkson, a location that’s mostly Boston doubling up as New York, and a lead who looks like she’d really rather be anywhere else, there is something sickly compelling about how disjointed and thoroughly incompetent Madame Web is, less as so-bad-its-fun Midnight Movie and more studio film-making in the 2020s at its very worst case study. The attempt to reposition it as a “suspense thriller” ultimately does the film more harm than good not just because there are absolutely no suspense or thrills here but also because if we were to take it as something more grounded, with no ties to the heightened superheroics of the world it comes from then we would find it even harder to suspend our disbelief throughout.

There is nothing gritty or believable about any of it. The film is as dumb and schlocky as the worst of the genre, with lousy network TV effects, uninvolving action and unfunny and inelegant dialogue, its characters drowning in poorly written exposition (even if the much-memed viral line from the trailer is sadly not in the movie itself). It also contains some of the most egregious examples of product placement I have seen in a long time, the worst of which has Pepsi and Pepsi ads show up at key dramatic moments, including an entire final set piece involving the actual Pepsi-Cola sign in Queens (before a coda involving the characters enjoying some ice-cold bottles of Pepsi).

As teased by the trailer, Johnson is distractingly disengaged. She is an actor who can work so well if used in just the right way by just the right director, here showing us the real limit of her abilities, one of the most ill-fitting tentpole leads I can remember. There’s such misjudged lethargy to her performance, not helped by her co-star Sweeney, in bizarre schoolgirl cosplay, and a small, odd role for Zosia Mamet, three actors who play as far too internal and muted for the frantic urgency of a flashy film such as this. Their casting is just one of many baffling decisions made here, the most baffling of which is the removal of any Spider-Man reference, made seemingly late in the day. An entire subplot has Emma Roberts as Ben Parker’s pregnant sister about to give birth to a baby whose name is never revealed (we almost hear it might start with maybe a P in one poorly edited scene) while the finale awkwardly rushes through the three teens in superhero costumes in the future (all play characters from the comics, including Spider-Woman). There’s even a strange butchering of the classic line about power and responsibility, its words scrambled around like we’re watching some janky rip-off made by people afraid of legal action.

What the average cinema-goer is supposed to get from this unholy mess, made curious only after a read of its torturous Wikipedia page, is a mystery. Superhero films are not dead (just today the trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine broke a YouTube record) but the age of superhero films like Madame Web surely is – soulless boardroom product made by no one who seems to care for no one who wants to watch.

• Madame Web is in cinemas on 14 February