Year of Release: 2024
Director: SJ Clarkson
Starring: Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabel Merced, Celeste O'Connor, Adam Scott, Tahar Rahim, Mike Epps, Emma Roberts, Kerry Bishe, Zosia Mamet, José Maria Yazpik, Kathy-Ann Hart, Josh Drennen, Jill Hennessy
Genre: Action, Adventure
Score out of ten (whole numbers only): 2
Watch it on Amazon
Synopsis and Review
"Madame Web" is writer/director SJ Clarkson's feature directorial debut, though she has been directing episodes for well known tv shows (including "Succession", "Vinyl", "Orance is the New Black", and "Bates Motel", to name but a few) since the early 2000s. The narrative of the film focuses on Cassandra Webb, a paramedic whose mother died in childbirth. While rescuing people from a dire situation, Cassandra falls to her apparent death, only to be rescued by one of her work colleagues. Everything seems fine with her, but she starts noticing that she can in reality predict what's going to happen in the near future. She does not know what prompts that ability or how to control it, but the occurrences start happening more and more frequently. Things escalate even further when she's on the subway, and has a vision of a masked individual coming into the train car, and assaulting/killing three teenaged girls. She manages to get them off the train, but the masked individual keeps coming after them, until she successfully manages to evade him, though now the police thinks she's kidnapping the girls. Cassandra decides to investigate more, since the girls are now under her protection, since they all seem to be slighted by their families (even if for different reasons). In the meantime, the man on their trail, Ezekiel, has ties to Cassandra's past, and wants to kill the girls since he fears that in the near future they will kill him. It's up to Cassandra to uncover what ties them all together, and how they can survive these challenges.
"Madame Web" is another character within the "Spider-Man" universe, and much like the films that Sony has released within that premise, such as "Venom" and "Morbius", it also fails to bring anything new to the comic book genre, or even for that matter, it even fails at being a compelling and competent narrative. The script is blatantly formulaic, starting with the origin of Cassandra's existence, all the way to how she becomes aware of her "powers", and even her interactions with the young women she saves. This film bypasses much in terms of giving any character any distinctiveness, including the main antagonist, whose apparent main interests during the film are basically two: firstly getting the power of a mythical spider, and avoid his own death in the future. It's a film that is abysmally written, with not much distinctiveness given to all the lead characters, and one where apparently these characters all exist in a world where there's no consequences to wreaking havoc in highly populated areas. The film comes across as a bad pilot for a TV Show, one that plants a series of ideas for development in further "episodes", with the issue of course being, that in order to warrant more episodes, the first one has to be effectively well done and the story well told. The director also fails to infuse the film with anything remotely stylish, or a point of view that is distinctive. The cast is squandered, with both Dakota Johnson and Tahar Rahim in particular having very little to do (and they can be formidable, as they demonstrated in "A Bigger Splash" and "A Prophet" respectively), while the supporting cast also fails to register at all. The production team is also disappointing, with Mauro Fiore's cinematography making the film register as a "911" tv-show episode, whereas Ethan Tobman's production design feels excessively artificial and lacking polish. It is a bad feature, one that even Adam Scott, Emma Roberts, and the two leads can't salvage.
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