Madame Web review: Lip-smackin’, face-slappin’, brain-eatin’, dumb-makin’, money-wastin’

We have, in recent years, come to view the bits of the live-action Spider-Man empire that Sony has retained – heads, thumbs and inner organs floating in jars – as near-annual gifts for those in need of a punching bag. The wretched Morbius? The chaotic Venom? You remember flinging uneaten nachos at them. Right?

Nothing about the lead-up to Madame Web has inspired confidence in a reversal. The trailer was laughed out of cinemas. No press show was scheduled for the circling vultures. Dakota Johnson has just about avoided rolling her eyes at nerds from flunky-monkey.com on the junket circuit.

I bring little good news from the first commercial screening. The dozen or so paying customers and I gaped at a bad film that feels cobbled together from failed attempts to make five or six mostly worse films.

To be fair, the first sequence in the main body is genuinely entertaining. Give me the romantic comedy with Johnson and Adam Scott driving an ambulance about New York City. They josh. They save lives. They don’t cause you to rub your eyes in dismay. Sadly, that takes up about 10 minutes. The rest concerns itself with four origin stories, a bio-horror fantasy, mad scientists and hints at an apparent connection with the core Spider-Man story. (Pay attention to Scott’s character and his sister, if you can be bothered.)

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Any comprehensive outline of the plot would require a lobotomy, but let’s give it a go. We start in Peru during the early 1970s. A pregnant scientist is searching for a rare spider with the aid of sleek, evil Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim). There is a tussle. She dies in childbirth and, yes, 30 years later the baby has become Johnson’s nominatively determined Cassie Web.

Arithmeticians among you will have worked out that this takes us up to the millennial years. By golly, the film doesn’t want you to forget it. We see a Blockbuster video store in practically the first shot. We see a huge mural for Beyoncé’s first album (a Sony release). A key scene revolves around Britney Spears’s Toxic (see preceding parentheses). Sadly, you can’t just put everyone in crushed-velvet loons as you might when making a film set in the late 1960s.

Anyway, after immersion in the East River, Cassie starts to develop signs of what is never explicitly called spidey sense. Essentially, her life takes on the quality of a film watched while sitting on your remote control. Unexpected rewinds abound. Out there, the near-robotic Sims – Rahim uncharacteristically delivers each line as if a cord has been pulled in a nearby Action Man’s chest – is tracking down three young women who, if unstopped, may grow to be his Spider-nemeses. One of them is the suddenly unavoidable, here underused Sydney Sweeney. The other two aren’t. Cassie becomes their protector.

Lost you? Sent you to sleep? No longer reading? Never mind. The clattering mess makes little sense to itself. If the recent travails of Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe suggest the Fall of Rome (and they probably don’t), then the increasingly barking Sony Marvels call to mind some smaller, more demented empire on a windy isthmus untroubled by classical elegance. The line “When you take on the responsibility, great power will come,” as someone actually says, feels like the Roger Corman straight-to-video version of the MCU’s “with great power comes great responsibility”.

The comparison is not entirely unflattering. For all its gimcrack incoherence, Madame Web – which would be nothing without Johnson’s charm – is a darn sight less pompous and up itself than the overstuffed Disney content. Nothing can, however, wave away product placement at a level that defies satire. Not only are bottles and cans of Pepsi positioned for easy contemplation, but the film also ends with a fight on a giant sign advertising that beverage. Lip-smackin’, face-slappin’, brain-eatin’, dumb-makin’, money-wastin’ Madame Web. Ah!