Madame Web

As with many cinematic missteps that came before, it would be interesting to see at what stage exactly Madame Web came apart at the seams. Precursors looked promising: Sony managed to sign a fetching mixture of internet favourites (Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Emma Roberts) and comedy guarantors (Adam Scott, Zosia Mamet, Kerry Bishé) and even procured A-list festival darling Tahar Rahim as the main antagonist.

However one of the elements working against the film was its own marketing, as trailers promised teen superheroes in the form of Spider Girls, even though in this regard, Madame Web itself is merely a 2-hour trailer of a Spider-Girl film waiting to happen.

Instead, the actual plot focuses on Cassandra Webb (Johnson), a 30-something EMT, who starts to have strange visions of near-future events after a work-related brush with death. On the New York City subway, she shares the car with three girls (Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor) and the urge to save them from a strange man (Rahim) becomes so strong, Webb even risks kidnapping charges. On her mission to protect the trio, Cassandra finds out that her connection to this sinister stranger goes as far back as her own birth.

Whoever expected a revival of the big superhero franchises will be the first to have their expectations disappointed, as most of the film orbits around drama, rather than action: the pains of growing up questioning a parent’s love, and on the other hand, teenagers, who wouldn’t dare speak to each other in school, bonding over being hunted by an adult man with superhuman strength. Cassandra learns how to access a web of interconnected timelines, which helps her become a “superhero” in her own right, but the film doesn’t operate on the fast-paced formula Marvel fans have grown accustomed to and the fight scenes lack the necessary panache.

The script also struggled to reconcile its focus on human consolidation with the required sense of threat, as inexplicably, (fully aware that their lives are in danger) the girls prioritise dancing on the tables of a diner over keeping a low profile in order to not get murdered.

If the asynchronous ADR of Rahim’s character is anything to go by, the feature’s dialogue may still have been rewritten in the editing stage. The lines we hear his character say do not match the movements on his lips, in a greater dissonance than a mere pacing issue in the re-recording would justify.

Its set in 2003 – likely in order to match with one of the Spiderman timelines as is strongly hinted at throughout the film – and in this regard, one has to commend the artistic continuity in set design and soundtrack. The posters on Times Square stem from Freddie Ljungberg’s first global CK campaign and the pop music featured in the film echoes the charts of the time.

Some of the flack Madame Web has received is exaggerated, as it is not necessarily a worse film than many of its fellow franchise staple goods. However, there are a number of features currently in cinemas more deserving of one’s time and money.

Selina Sondermann

Madame Web is released nationwide on 14^th February 2024.

Watch the trailer for Madame Web here: