Sony Marvel movies have never been the cream of the crop, but they've never sunk as low as the stupid, boring new mess, MADAME WEB.
The dialogue in a screenplay credited to four writers is loaded with some of the worst lines I've ever heard in a major film. They are delivered by a cast that does what they can, trying to spin something out nothing, except for two of the leads.
Dakota Johnson makes her local-theater level acting in those "50 Shades" debacles look like Shakespeare with her low voltage effort here. Alternating between completely flat line readings and just plain bad acting, Johnson stars as Cassandra Webb (Web, get it!? oh my how clever) a NYC paramedic who begins having clairvoyant moments, experiencing dangerous events right before they happen.
Her character is an anti-social, emotionally disconnected dullard who looks with scorn upon a child in an emergency room who's trying to thank her for saving their parent. Johnson is flat out unlikable. Is this what passes for a hero these days? How depressing.
Soon, our equally low wattage villain appears. Tahar Rahim (Napoleon) is silly, miscast and non-threatening as Ezekiel, a rich man with some spidey powers who stole a Peruvian spider from Cassie's Mom many years before. Rahim's voice sometimes seems like it's badly dubbed, or just strangely affected. Maybe he read the script and decided he'd just talk funny to make something interesting.
Anyway, he's having nightly visions of three Spiderman-like girls who kill him in a battle. He taps into the government's ability to see every street and ATM camera
in the country to track down those girls.
Conveniently, Cassie ends up in their path and becomes their protector.
I won't bore you with what follows, because it's so predictable I don't need to.
Instead, let's look at some of the lowest points of this impotent bomb.
At one point. Ezekiel attacks everyone in a NYC subway, but not one of those same cameras that he's monitoring seem to capture anything odd for the police.
At the end of that same chase, Cassie steals a NYC Yellow Cab, which she proceeds to drive around New York and New Jersey in for OVER A WEEK!
Really? So there was no APB for that stolen vehicle involved in an incident that killed or injured numerous police?
Director S.J. Clarkson's background is solely on TV series and after this unimaginative big screen effort, she'll be heading back to cable. So many choices are clumsy and clunky they leap off the screen very painfully.
For example, in the opening flashback to Cassie's mom hunting spiders in Peru, one character references her being pregnant. The next shot has her clumsily pull back her coat to show her pregnant belly. It's so amateurish that it almost made me laugh out loud. Is this a Sony movie or a 6th grade class project?
The three young actresses that play our trio of eventual Ezekiel slayers are better than the movie and fair far better than poor Adam Scott (Big Little Lies, Step Brothers) who is always an enjoyable and funny actor. Here, all his acting powers are stripped bare by having to play all his scenes against the wet dish rag that is Dakota Johnson. He should have asked to film his dialogue talking to a stick. The wood would have provided more human interaction. How does this Nepo baby still have a career in Hollywood?
The ending seems to try and set up future sequels with a half ass X-Men style scene that falls just as flat as the rest of this schlock.
Sony needs to stop making Marvel movies.
The only thing more clumsy than the story telling are all the Pepsi product placements that run rampant throughout. By the end, I desperately wanted a Coke.
MADAME WEBB is a mega-bomb and complete waste, a new low for Marvel that earns a rare F.
Just stop Sony. Enough is enough.
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