I don’t mind bad movies. Most of the time, I find something to enjoy in even the worst of them.
What I do mind is cynical movies. The kind of early-2000s TV-dinner types, that are made by accountants and executives. People who’ve seen others make art out of the most crass populist fare, and thought: “well, that doesn’t seem that hard.”
The latest result in this line of thinking is Madame Web, a two-hour trailer for the already canceled sequel. A film so wildly incomprehensible and inept, it makes Morbius look downright passable.
The story begins in the Peruvian Amazon, where Constance Webb is searching for a rare breed of spider that holds miraculous healing powers. She’s double-crossed by one of the most under-developed villains in film history. His name is Ezekiel Sims, and he had a rough life until now. That’s really all we get.
Sims gets away with the spider, leaving Constance to die in the Amazon. Luckily, she’s saved by the local spider-people(!), who promise that, when the time is right (about 90 minutes later), her daughter will be provided the exposition necessary to move on to the next scene.
Years later, said daughter, Cassie (Dakota Johnson), is an ambulance driver with abandonment issues, living in New York. Her only friend is fellow EMT Ben, who is about to be an Uncle Ben, and it would be really exciting if this was 1999, and there weren’t already four different Spider-Man franchises.
Cassie and Ben help out where they can, until one day Cassie is involved in a freak accident, which in turn unleash her dormant powers of foresight. Meanwhile, Sims is now a super-wealthy tycoon of unexplained origins, who is terrified that three teenagers, all born tragically without personalities, will one day be the death of him.
Luckily for Cassie, she’s the protagonist. She quickly learns that her magic powers are the friends she makes along the way.
Madame Web is the kind of disaster that’s born out of greed. Sony really wants their own Marvel success story, and they’ll do anything to get it. The results, so far, are mixed. For every Across the Spider-Verse (which now feels like a freakish accident), there’s a Morbius and Madame Web to contend with.
It’s not just a bad film. That I could ignore. Madame Web is worse because it’s a film that suffers from the most obvious executive meddling imaginable.
Entire sequences have obvious dialog replacement to cover up for last-minute plot changes. Half the film requires exposition to keep the audience aware of what the hell is going on. It feels like a movie cobbled together out of three different ones.
Then, as if to cap it off with something worse, the film dares to pretend like it’s some kind of beacon for feminist positivity by tacking on a depressingly cynical girl power message. It has all the sincerity of a Mountain Dew ad, and all the artistry, to boot.
If it were a half-hour shorter, it might be a bizarre train-wreck that works for a drinking game. A fun distraction that you can watch with friends and ask: “what were they thinking?”
But it’s over two hours long, and it barely has enough story for an opening act of any better film. By the halfway point, when you realize Cassie still needs to go hear some platitudes from an offensive Peruvian stereotype, it feels like the movie is just bullying you for no reason.
There are certainly worse comic book movies out there. Maybe.