Madame Web Movie Review: Neither Dakota Johnson nor Sydney Sweeney Can Save The Film
Cast: Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Emma Roberts, Adam Scott, Jill Hennessy, Zosia Mamet, Tahar Rahim, Celeste O`Connor, Mike Epps, Josh Drennen, Michael Malvesti, Wes Meserve
Director: S. J. Clarkson
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 2.5/5 (two and a half stars)
It almost makes you want to defend it ex officio, Madame Web, the fourth title in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, the franchise dedicated to secondary characters from the world of Spider-Man. Born in the aftermath of the disappointing second Amazing, evidently overshadowed by the more brilliant Marvel Cinematic Universe with which it will intersect in the future, it has so far produced a handful of aspiring blockbusters with declining box office (from the eight hundred-odd million of the first Venom to just over one hundred and sixty collected from Morbius) but all rather mocked by commentators. Madame Web has already been massacred by American critics, which should make us understand that perhaps it’s not so bad: unfortunately, even they get it right now and then and the public is also signing the condemnation (does the misogyny of often toxic fans have anything to do with it too?). There is an aura of mystery and magic that surrounds Sony’s Marvel productions: they have the power to take anyone who enters the theater to see one back 20 years every time.
A wonderful thing that leads us to advise you to do anything during the screening that you now feel too old to do (anything legal!) because the worst thing that can happen to you is, unfortunately, watching the film. This happens punctually, despite the earnings of Venom or the irony that Morbius can arouse. Sony’s Marvel films are old, not only in form but also in content, which is worse. Then came the news about the movie we’re about to talk about. In the review of Madame Web, in cinemas from 14 February 2024 distributed by Eagles Pictures, we talk to you about a title that instead promises to finally talk about the contemporary, moving away from comics and building a team of superheroines, a bit like it did last year last saw Marvel on the Disney side with The Marvels (here’s our review), although with more than questionable results. An important and very interesting ambition to the point that it can represent an important future for cinecomics.
Madame Web Movie Review: The Story Plot
Madame Web begins in the Peruvian jungle of 1973, where Dr. Constance Webb (Kerry Bishé), despite being 9 months pregnant, continues undaunted to follow the trail of a mysterious spider with incredible powers. We don’t even have time to frame her for a moment and here we see her betrayed and left dying by her fellow explorer: Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim). She is rescued by a mysterious population of local spidermen, but they only manage to save her newborn baby, Cassandra Webb. Giving her face twenty years after her is the very cute Dakota Johnson, who does her best to give us a dazed misanthropic weirdo, asocial and in possession of clairvoyant powers that not even she understands well.
Cassandra is a paramedic in New York, her only friend is her colleague Ben Parker (Adam Scott) and after almost dying on duty, she begins to have strange visions of the future. He doesn’t know that even Sims, who has become a sort of Superman thanks to the powers of the Peruvian spider, is now its prey, and that he lives in terror caused by a near-death vision that continually shows him the young Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Mattie (Celeste O’ Connor) and Anya (Isabela Merced) destroy it. The three are currently banal teenagers without superpowers, but determined not to leave anything to chance, Sims sets out on their trail, without knowing that Cassandra is also destined to cross paths with them. If put like this, Madame Web seems like a particular mix between chaos and lack of inventiveness, don’t worry, it just means you have an excellent instinct.
From the beginning, Madame Web has been characterized by a very short breath, by an aesthetic of such poverty that it seems to have emerged from the early 2000s when titles like Elektra, DareDevil, or Catwoman came close to destroying the cinecomic genre. But he is in good company, given that Sony itself in recent years has alternated masterpieces such as the Spiderverse saga with rubbish such as the two Venom and Morbius. But trust me, even the latter is a true masterpiece compared to what SJ Clarkson gave us, in criminal complicity in writing with Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, the minds behind cinematic horrors such as the aforementioned Morbius, Power Rangers and Gods of Egypt. We are in 2003 and Cassie (Johnson) is a hard-hearted, ironic, unscrupulous, and hardened paramedic from a childhood marked by her being an orphan.
Her colleague is a certain Ben (Scott), who has fallen in love with a certain woman, whose sister, Mary (Roberts), is about to give birth to a certain child. A few words to the wise. However, an accident during an operation reveals to the girl her powers (extraordinary ones too) linked to her past and which allow her to see the future. Amid the crisis, the girl continues to suffer the traumatic manifestations of this new ability, which leads her to see a man kill three girls who, coincidentally, are in the carriage with her when the massacre takes place. These three girls are Julia Carpenter (Sweeney), Mattie Franklin (O’Connor), and Anya Corazon (Merced) and the one who wants to kill them is a sort of Spider-Man in a black suit. Incredible how fate is fundamental even in a film that tells of a heroine who moves forward and changes her future. However, this meeting will lead to unpredictable consequences for everyone involved and will lead Cassie to truly discover who she is and what she is capable of doing.
Madame Web Movie Review and Analysis
It would be improper to speak of disappointment while preparing to write the review of Madame Web, since the expectations of spectators, in general, were not very high. However, there was a lot of curiosity, since the film promised to be unusual even for the comic book genre which now boasts a great variety of declinations. And indeed the film takes a path never traveled before, telling the story of a young visionary who embarks on a personal journey of self-discovery, while finding along her path a series of figures who will complete her, forming with her a sisterhood of outcasts who find their sense of existence in mutual communion. In the source material, Cassandra Webb is a mysterious, blind, paraplegic, elderly figure with impressive psychic powers. Nothing could be more different from the athletic and young Johnson.
It is clear that the choice of a much loved and followed actress was made to meet the public, however, the former heroine of the 50 Shades saga seizes the opportunity and manages, despite shaky writing, to give life to a character ironic and genuinely having fun while babysitting the characters of Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O’Connor and Isabela Merced, all extremely sacrificed in the film, with two-dimensional and vaguely stereotyped characters, but still capable of giving a nice energy to the story as a whole. Despite its captivating protagonists, Madame Web runs aground in the stylistic and narrative choices that transform it and make it “old”. The film embraces an early 2000s cinecomic aesthetic, which appears decidedly clumsy and out of time. If the choice to reproduce a specific narrative and aesthetic style was deliberately made because the film was set (without a real dramaturgical reason) in 2003, then one could also understand its usefulness or at least a sense. However, the fact that the film speaks a cinematic language that no longer exists seems rather dependent on a lack of ideas and a brilliant point of view that can effectively re-tell the story of these comic book icons in a contemporary way to today’s audience.
Dakota Johnson‘s Madame Web is a sarcastic young woman who does not seem very comfortable in action scenes, and this is not because the actress is not capable of supporting them but because these scenes are constructed with little precision as if they were not important. Of course, the search for one’s place in the world, self-determination, and self-awareness are much more central elements than the “beats”, for Cassandra, but also in her battle against the evil Ezekiel (a very wasted Tahar Rahim), the sequences of action are certainly not inspired. Madame Web makes fun of its fans and tells a story of origins that is ultimately very classic, mixing the cards on the table a bit and misleading the viewer who expects a different type of story, a female team-up, as Birds of Prey or The Marvels had already done. However, this does not prevent the actresses from doing their part, compatibly with the screenplay which is too often specious and confusing, and with a style of storytelling which, by making an effort to find an original point of view and new ways of telling the story (especially the scenes of premonitions), it ends up making a big mess.
We are in the area of the unfortunate Morbius with Jared Leto, so to speak, but at least this time the protagonists take themselves less seriously. The film seems aware of its limitations, but boldly exposes them all from the first moment, thus trying to make amends for its shortcomings. If he succeeds, the viewer will decide. It must be said that at least Madame Web had the foresight to inform us that her story takes place at the beginning of the 2000s, given that this too is an ancient film, despite the refreshing that it wants to give with the modernization of its protagonist compared to the original version of the printed paper and the topics covered. Imagine if Sony’s Marvel division managed to make a 2024 film. This is not a 2024 film in terms of writing, dialogue, or even the banal metanarrative gimmicks that nod a little to the MCU and a little to the comics, not to mention the staging and editing, undoubtedly the worst thing about the film. movie. The action scenes are always fake, poorly thought out, worse choreographed, always chaotic, and without real bite, especially in the classic showdown moment, which almost recalls that of Venom – Fury of Carnage.
The film aims to include many other films, changing imaginaries, points of view, and scenarios. This a choice that is made more and more often in blockbusters, but it is done in such a clumsy way that the rhythm collapses, without ever managing to link them to each other, disorientating the spectator to the point of tiring him and making him lose sight of the ball, which is to create a multiple origin story. Not really. The in-depth analysis of the various characters becomes flatter as we move forward (especially that of a villain who could instead have had some interesting readings, especially regarding the discussion on the relationship with the future contrary to that of the protagonist, which is the subtext of the film) and not even the moment confessions manage to save the next heroines, who never convince. Yes, next, not present.
Madame Web is a film that, like Cassie, wants to create a network among the most heroines, among the most orphans, among the most abandoned outsiders in search of redemption and wants to reach Dama through a coming of age that passes through the acceptance of one’s past. Excellent, current, but how she does it, the result she arrives at, and the staging are so out of time that this film will hardly have a future. Ironic, because it tells of characters who fight to have it. Clarkson had already left many perplexed about the director’s choice, but when it became known that the budget available for Madame Web, which effectively opens the doors to the Spider-Women universe, was only 80 million dollars, everyone was happy or misunderstood what would happen.
The film is a disaster when it comes to world-building, editing, and direction, in addition to being old, obsolete, and lacking a shred of panache, it is weighed down by some of the worst dialogue ever seen at the cinema in recent years. Words and events overlap without a common thread, without there being a credible crescendo, without even an aesthetic that manages to suffocate the poor identity, almost like a television product from twenty years ago, of what we have in front of us. This torment lasts 116 minutes and I assure you that every second is a boulder. If Johnson, armed with those two big eyes, still works despite everything, it is the chemistry between her and the other three performers that is absent. The fault lies in the script which is, to say the least, lame, in the minimal characterization, in the very little time dedicated to three characters who should be young teenagers but who, as per American tradition, are played by three twenty-year-olds.
Sweeney is now trapped in the role of sexy Lolita, but at least she tries to make sense of her Julia, while O’Connor and Merced seem to have emerged from certain teen series of the past, so stereotyped as to appear almost involuntarily comical. Things aren’t any better for Rahim, his Sims is a sort of faded copy of the late Goblin, he tries to give him a certain ambiguous charm, but everything goes to hell the moment he goes over the top without a minimum of conviction. Madame Web has almost caricatural action scenes, the make-up is at the level of the worst cosplayers, and the sound part is an absurd mix of the early 2000s, otherwise recreated cheaply. Everything is sped up, everything is hastily rushed shockingly in the salient moments, then we go on and on and get lost in meaningless sequences without a minimum of the construct. Madame Web is one of those films that you don’t understand how and why they arrived in theaters, above all it joins The Marvels in keeping female-centric blockbusters at dramatically low levels in terms of quality and perspective. The problem is that looking at what Marvel and Sony have planned, one gets the feeling that creating other cinematic crimes is almost a vocation for them now.
Madame Web Movie Review: The Last Words
Madame Web by SJ Clarkson is a film that wants to create a network between multiple heroines, and a new all-female family and wants to do it through a coming of age that passes through the acceptance of the past of a modernized protagonist. The problem is that it is written, edited, and shot badly, in an old-fashioned and at times inadmissible way, with an absent rhythm and a problem of overcrowding of half-baked imagery, genres, and ideas (including visual ones). Neither Dakota Johnson nor Sydney Sweeney can save him, much less Celeste O’Connor, Isabela Merced, and Tahar Rahim. An operation that is understandable only on paper will not be enough to earn a future, despite trying in every possible way.
Madame Web Movie Review: Neither Dakota Johnson nor Sydney Sweeney Can Save The Film - Filmyhype
Director: S. J. Clarkson
Date Created: 2024-02-14 17:28
2.5
Pros
- The staging, especially in the action scenes.
- The character writing is flat.
- The editing is very reviewable.
- The construction of history is full of contradictions.
- The film is ancient, despite the themes.
Cons
- Sydney Sweeney and Dakota Johnson try to bring nuance to their characters.
- In theory it wasn't a bad intention.
