Madame Web Is An Avant-Garde Masterpiece

What a picture!

Okay. There are two ways to look at this. 1. This is a terrible movie. 2. This is a purposefully terrible movie that mocks the superhero template in such a bold and daring way so as to finally destroy the genre and bring back rom-coms, heist movies and literally anything else.

The first option is probably closer to the truth, but as Madame Web says, “You know the best thing about the future? It hasn't happened yet.”

It’s that kind of unfathomably stupid nonsense that gives me hope in No. 2 here.

Madame Web is part of this ingenious idea by Sony to make a Spider-Man universe without Spider-Man. We already have Venom, Morbius and the preposterously bad-looking Kraven the Hunter. This all makes a lot of sense if you don’t think about it. It’s like making Barbie without Barbie or Oppenheimer without an atomic bomb or Maestro without a preposterously large Jewish nose replica. Imagine Bradley Cooper with a normal-sized nose playing Leonard Bernstein. You can’t. It wouldn’t make sense.

Although not a comedy per se, our pretty full audience treated the second half of the film as if it were Anchorman. Just jokes flying at you a mile a minute. And yes, they weren’t “jokes” or “funny” or “smart",” but it’s like when you hang out with someone just unintentionally hilarious. A laugh’s a laugh no matter where it comes from. From its inane Pepsi advertising to Dakota Johnson’s fully-removed performance to its villain’s hare-brained scheme to kill a bunch of teenagers because they might kill him one day, this movie’s working overtime to try to be a movie.

I think what makes this so odd is how grounded the stakes are in a supposed superhero movie. I’m not against taking the always-heightened superhero genre (which usually consists of cities being leveled and purple guys with gauntlets wiping out half the planet) and lowering the drama, but when the plot is so small as to involve five people, it makes it seem like an accident, especially when the powers are so needlessly confusing.

A good portion of the movie is filmed in a “forest” locale, which just as easily could be in a grouping of trees at a nearby culdesac. There’s little thought or care but into a single thing. I don’t think anyone wanted to be there, and that kind of love for the craft shows.

And it’s not like the actors are bad, although they are shockingly inept here. But Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney have it in them to be good. They’re both dramatically let down by the script, directing, cameramen … well, really everything. It feels like everyone’s sleepwalking through this one. I’m not expecting everyone to be fully attached to every project, but if you have no desire or care about this terrible material, couldn’t you just do something else? But yeah, I get it. The money’s good. Can’t really blame you there.

Maybe I’m being optimistic, but this does feel like the end of something. This origin story of sorts was set up to be the start of yet another series and it did so poorly and the actors are so annoyed by the entire thing that it’s dead upon release. Sony’s even banking on its wildly successful rom-com Anyone But You to absorb the hit from Madame Web. That’s quite the downfall from the superhero heyday.

What’s next? Well, it seems like biopics with known figures will be the big wave. The Bob Marley movie (which looks terrible but I haven't seen yet) has been putting up solid numbers. And it was just announced that Sam Mendes will be working on four films based on each member of The Beatles, which feels like overkill, but I’ll see each one, so who am I to judge? With the superhero movie flailing, studios have jumped to a different kind of intellectual property, which is both kind of a bummer and also not shocking at all.

The good news is that the actors may have a bigger sandbox to play in. Dakota Johnson is following this bomb with Materialists, a new movie from Past Lives’ Celine Song. It’s supposedly a love triangle with Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal. The former Captain America and upcoming Mr. Incredible in an actual movie from a real filmmaker? Man, Madame Web really changed the world, didn’t it?