The character Cassie Web, played by Dakota Johnson, turns down a thank-you present from a woman whose child she just saved in the opening moments of Madame Web, the newest superhero movie based on a comic series that is close to Spider-Man. You may presumably infer from this that, in addition to being uncomfortable with children, she will eventually need to defend some of them. You won’t need psychic abilities to figure that one out, unlike many other highly anticipated scenes in the movie, even though Cassie herself does eventually acquire them.
If you were a clairvoyant, though, you might have wished to use your abilities to gently advise the cast not to see this movie, as it somehow manages to be both underdeveloped and overwritten. Although the most of the actors are incredibly gifted, there’s only so much they can do with the script. Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O’Connor as Spider-Women have very little to do here; Adam Scott, fresh off his unimpressive turn in Severance, takes on a curious incarnation of Spidey’s Uncle Ben. Tahar Rahim, who is often a blistering presence in Prophet films, is left to thankless cruel villain duties here.
There are the kind of will-this-do one-liners where the dialogue required wit and flare.
Madame Web may have a little less digital debris floating around than some of the more recent superhero movies. This is the outcome of a more compact and self-contained story with the kind of clever time-loop problems you would recognize from sci-fi shorts. However, in places where the language lacked humor and energy, it contains the kind of forced one-liners (“Hope the spiders were worth it, Mom!”) and cliched backstories that result from characters who are too one-dimensional to have complex personalities. (A few weak ADRs give the impression of a last-minute attempt to make edit corrections.)
Hints of classical storytelling survive, like the final vestiges of a vanished civilization peering through the ruins of a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Cassie’s arc has a Freudian motif thanks to the fateful inheritance of a birthright from a deceased parent, and the villain’s attempt to eradicate the next generation out of a fear that they will bring about his own demise is, at least on paper, a more intriguing and compelling motivation than another villain seeking to destroy the universe. And in place of Chekhov’s pistol, we have “Chekhov’s CPR,” a fresh take on a time-honored classic. It’s insufficient to counteract the eerie feeling that the term “Marvel” is more often associated with a shrug than with wonder when it comes to the property often referred to as the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters (SPUMC).