MADAME WEB (2024)

Studio:   Columbia Pictures
Director: S.J. Clarkson
Writer:   Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, Claire Parker, S.J. Clarkson, Kerem Sanga
Producer: Lorenzo di Bonaventura
Stars:    Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O'Connor, Tahar Rahim, Mike Epps, Emma Roberts, Adam Scott, Kerry Bishe, Zosia Mamet, Jose Maria Yazpik

Review Score:

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Summary:

Spider-Man's mythology expands when a clairvoyant woman discovers her true destiny as she races to protect three future superheroes from the man who murdered her mother.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

In the Peruvian Amazon in 1973, pregnant researcher Constance Webb finally captures an elusive spider species whose rare peptides are capable of giving people superhuman abilities. Constance's bodyguard, Ezekiel Sims, reveals himself as a traitor when he suddenly executes the rest of the research team. During a struggle, Ezekiel shoots Constance in her torso before escaping with the spider.

A tribe of superpowered "spider people" known as Las Aranas rescues Constance by taking her to a cave where she gives birth in a pool of water to a daughter she names Cassandra. The tribe's leader, Santiago, vows to be there for Cassie when she inevitably returns seeking answers to her unique origin. Constance dies.

In New York in 2003, Cassandra Webb works as an apathetic paramedic partnered with military veteran Ben Parker. While rushing a patient to the hospital, Cassie is forced to momentarily stop her ambulance for a skateboarding schoolgirl, later revealed to be Mattie Franklin, who flips her off. At the hospital, Cassie briefly encounters Julia Cornwall, the stepdaughter of the woman she and Ben just rescued. Back at her apartment building, Cassie unknowingly walks by teenager Anya Corazon, whose struggling family lives downstairs from her.

On another rescue call with Ben, Cassie becomes caught in an overturned car that falls off a bridge into water. Before Ben fishes her out, Cassie briefly dies and witnesses a haunting vision. Afterward, she has a precognitive experience where she lives out the same brief sequence two times.

Ezekiel Sims, who used the Peruvian spider to give himself spider-like abilities including a venom touch and flashes of the future, seduces an NSA agent. That night, Ezekiel has his recurring nightmare of three superpowered "Spider-Women" in costumes killing him. Upon waking, Ezekiel uses his venom touch to coerce the NSA agent into giving him her password to access technology that will allow him to identify his future killers.

Cassie reluctantly attends a baby shower for Ben's pregnant sister-in-law Mary Parker. During the party, Cassie experiences another brief time loop.

Cassie and Ben are called to another emergency with their supervisor O'Neil. Cassie sees a vision of O'Neil in a fatal vehicle crash but, still uncertain of what is happening to her, she fails to stop him from getting hit by a truck and dying.

Ezekiel creates images of the women from his nightmare that his assistant Amaria de-ages and uses with the stolen NSA tech to identify as Mattie Franklin, Julia Cornwall, and Anya Corazon. Ezekiel tasks Amaria with locating the trio. Meanwhile, Cassie finally accepts that she can glimpse the future when she uses a vision to prevent a pigeon from flying into her window.

On a subway, Cassie sees a vision of Ezekiel using his abilities to kill Mattie, Julia, and Anya, all of whom are passengers on the same train. Although they are confused, Cassie manages to frantically rush the three girls off of the train before Ezekiel can get to them. The girls realize Cassie is telling the truth about a superpowered man trying to kill them when Ezekiel continues pursuing them by crawling on the ceiling in a costume. Cassie ultimately escapes with the trio in a stolen taxi, but the police issue a bulletin that tags Cassie as a kidnapper.

While hiding in a forest, the three girls realize that they have encountered Cassie before. Cassie explains she can sometimes see the future, but she doesn't know how her ability works, how they are all connected, or who Ezekiel is and what he wants.

Cassie tells Mattie, Julia, and Anya to remain in the forest while she returns to her apartment to investigate what's happening. Among her mother's old research journals that document people with spider-like abilities such as a sixth sense for predicting the future, Cassie finds a photograph of her mother with Ezekiel.

Mattie, Julia, and Anya ignore Cassie's instruction to lie low by hiking to a nearby diner where they draw attention to themselves at a table of boys. A patron recognizes the girls from the news and calls in a tip, which Amaria intercepts to give Ezekiel their location. After seeing another vision of Ezekiel attacking them, Cassie arrives at the diner in time to rescue the trio. Amaria's surveillance of the incident informs Ezekiel that the woman protecting the girls is Cassandra Webb, the daughter of his former colleague Constance.

While hiding in a motel, Cassie learns Julia just ran away from home because her birth mother is in a psych ward and she feels her stepfamily doesn't want her, Mattie's parents left her alone while they are in China, and Anya is an illegal immigrant whose mother died and she can't go to the police for fear of deportation. Cassie relates to them as someone who also doesn't have a mother.

In a predictive vision, Cassie returns to the destroyed diner where an encounter with Ezekiel informs her that he wants to kill the girls to prevent them from killing him when they become superpowered in the future. Fearful of Ezekiel's neurotoxin touch, Cassie teaches the trio CPR so they'll know how to resuscitate someone.

Cassie leaves Mattie, Julia, and Anya with Ben while she travels to Peru to learn more about Ezekiel and her mother. In Peru, Cassie meets Santiago, who initiates a vision that reveals Constance went to the Amazon to find the rare spider so she could heal her unborn child from a fatal genetic disorder. Santiago explains that if Cassie can harness her ability to see the future, she will eventually gain the ability to be in multiple places at the same time.

Ben's sister-in-law Mary unexpectedly goes into labor. With Ben forced to bring the three girls with them to the hospital, Amaria is finally able to track their location for Ezekiel.

Cassie returns to New York in time to rescue everyone from Ezekiel once again. While Ben continues to the hospital with Mary, Cassie and the girls continue outrunning and fighting against Ezekiel. Aided by her visions, Cassie lures Ezekiel into a derelict fireworks factory where his explosive battle against Mattie, Julia, and Anya reaches its final faceoff. Ezekiel eventually dies, and Cassie also falls unconscious. However, the three girls use CPR to revive her.

Mary gives birth to a boy she names Peter. Although blinded and crippled by her showdown with Ezekiel, Cassie gains full control of her clairvoyance in the aftermath. Cassie vows to mentor Mattie, Julia, and Anya on their path to becoming future superheroes.

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Review:

"Madame Web" could not escape its destiny. It was born to be bad. "Morbius" (review here), which Madame Web herself could have seen would blow up as a bomb even as far back as principal photography in 2019, was a universally derided disappointment. So why on Earth-616 would anyone willingly invite its screenwriters back to pen a second cinematic universe starter when their first go failed so infamously? Additionally, director S.J. Clarkson certainly has extensive experience in television, including three episodes of "Heroes" and two episodes of "Jessica Jones," but maybe a major motion picture meant to birth a series of spinoffs wasn't a situation set up for success for a first-time feature.

Besides being creatively behind the eight-ball to begin with, have you ever thought about exactly how Hollywood makes matters worse? Perhaps a parallel from my other life as a copywriter can offer some speculation as to how studio notes, artistic interference, and too many cooks can contribute to making a collective mess in an already chaotic kitchen.

I write copy in the entertainment industry, with the bulk of my work being those synopses seen on the backs of Blu-ray boxes. Like any project that has to pass through multiple levels of approval, it is of course not at all unusual to receive requests for revisions. Marketing departments may have specific ideas in mind with what they want something to say. Art departments might need things to fit a certain size. Essentially, multiple needs must be satisfied, and you may have to keep tuning until everyone gets what they want, or something close to it.

Sometimes, copy will come back already rewritten, and it will resemble anything from a close clone to a completely rebuilt Frankenstein of a monster. Sometimes, it's just a word or two. Maybe someone has a hang-up about a particular adjective, so they swap it out with a different one. Seems simple enough, except that change might be made without considering how it affects the rest of the paragraph. I've had to point out before that a replacement word already appeared in another sentence, so suddenly we sounded like a broken record.

There have also been cases where someone might want the final sentence to be first, for instance. Again, that's theoretically fine, until such a swap changes the flow of how the whole thing reads. You can't always pull pieces apart, move parts around or plunk new bits in, and sew everything back together under an assumption that everything is still in there somewhere. Rhythm doesn't work that way.

That's not dissimilar to how studio suits or other people in power cut into a creative idea without seeing how what they think is a tiny ripple can actually create a tidal wave. You've heard the stories about producer Jon Peters' insistence on shoving giant spiders into his movies? Along similar lines, imagine there's a 65-year-old executive in the room who has never read a comic book in her life, so she archaically regards them as "funny books" for children. Then when a script or test footage comes in depicting an antagonist like a street-level sociopath, she demands they ham up his character so he turns into her idea of a cartoon bad guy. Maybe someone else says a scene contains elements that could be problematic for foreign markets, so they demand its excision to avoid complications in overseas territories. Don't forget the folks who paid big bucks to have their brand name featured prominently onscreen. Got to make sure their items make it into the movie somehow, as well.

By the time everyone who has some sort of say in the final cut has stroked their egos, fulfilled a favor for a family member, or justified their job by demanding their input be acknowledged, a movie might look like an entirely different entity than whatever was originally envisioned. How else is there to explain "Madame Web's" extraordinary mishmash of notable names tucked into inconsequential roles, shoehorned plot beats, endless exposition written to be blandly basic, and a hilariously obvious pileup of Pepsi product placement? Did a Pepsico CEO have a seat at the decision-making table, too?

Yet the jumbled mess of five different writers (and there were probably more who went uncredited) patchworking competing scripts together while plugging in additional variables set forth by parent companies only explains "Madame Web's" dopey narrative. It doesn't explain why every word out of Cassie Webb's nemesis Ezekiel Sims sounds like it came from a completely different person in a sound booth rather than from actor Tahar Rahim's mouth. Did Rahim get Sam J. Jones-ed or was the boom operator so terrible at his job that all of Ezekiel's dialogue had to be re-recorded?

It also doesn't explain why all of the acting is uniformly awkward. Dakota Johnson delivers lines so listlessly, she might be mistaken for a female Pinocchio. In her defense, even Meryl Streep would have a hard time pulling "Madame Web's" mid material out of the sewage-flooded cellar. "He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died" might have been cut from the movie, but what was left in isn't much better. I started going back through the film to pull a few of the silliest quotes as examples, then I realized virtually every single exchange provides proof of how ham-handed each spoken interaction is.

Built on a bed of cliches and contrivances, like Cassie never before noticing the man in the only picture she possesses of her mother, or a flimsy finale conveniently set inside a fireworks factory, "Madame Web's" best bit is the final two minutes that flash forward to a presumably better movie where the three girls under Cassie's protection fight as superpowered heroes in Spider-Women costumes, instead of being yanked around as an indistinguishable mass that's merely a magnet for the vanilla villain. I want whatever movie Jill Hennessy originally signed up for, because I can't imagine an actor who fronted two long-running TV series was only supposed to be an unnamed "Beautiful Woman" in two throwaway scenes here. Ditto Emma Roberts, who was clearly cast because someone anticipated she'd need to repeat her role as Peter Parker's mother in a beefier sequel we'll never see, yet only plays a brief part that could have been filled by any competent first-timer working for scale.

Whatever "Madame Web" was supposed to be once upon a time, or any of the wishful-thinking spinoffs that will never be made despite several seeds being planted, could only be better than the hodgepodge of hokum this dippy disaster is. Should these films keep flopping, the Power That Be might consider a post-mortem process to figure out which bad decisions kept making "Madame Web" worse. Because how many times can grand plans for a new cinematic universe keep starting over from scratch when a stench as strong as "Madame Web" still hangs in the air?

Review Score: 35

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