52 Films by Women Vol 8. 7. Madame Web (Director: SJ Clarkson)

 

Still courtesy of Sony Pictures

Unlikely to recoup its $80 million production budget domestically, Madame Web, the first Spiderman-spin-off movie to be directed by a woman (in this case, SJ Clarkson), is that rarity – a superhero film without a genuine superhero in it. New York city ambulance driver, Cassandra ‘Cassie’ Webb (Dakota Johnson) has a spider-venom induced gift of being able to see a version of the future that turns out bad in order to be able to do something about it – or not, in one instance. However, this does not compare with having super strength, being able to walk up buildings or shoot toxin from her wrists. However, her nemesis, Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim) has such powers and a latex suit to match. Ezekiel is cursed by repeated premonitions of three schoolgirls causing his downfall - which must indicate some guilt about going to Jeffrey Epstein’s island - and he is determined to find them, stealing classified tech from the National Security Administration, and hiring a computer whizz, Amaria (Zosia Mamet) to use it. ‘This is what they look like in your vision,’ Amaria tells Ezekiel, showing him three photographs. ‘And this is what they look like now.’ The tech basically unmasks them, though how Ezekiel is about to describe them so accurately is a mystery. He must be an excellent sketch artist.

Films like Madame Web collapse on the flimsiness of their own internal logic but you can go with it if you choose. Naturally, supervillains have the coolest apartments in New York City complete with an environment to keep a rare species of spider alive. They can hook up with an unaccompanied NSA official during a trip to the opera, turning up late and handing them a programme by means of a silent but sexy seduction. Any security service worth its budget would warn senior officials about going home with foreign looking strangers, especially two years after 9/11 – the film is set in 2003. However, one should not under-estimate the appeal of animal magnetism in a film about spiders.

Sony Pictures own the rights to the Marvel superhero Spiderman, which for the uninitiated tells the story of a high school student, Peter Parker, bitten by a radioactive spider who gains superpowers and fights crime in New York City. Over the last twenty years, Sony, through Columbia Pictures, has have released eight films featuring three different actors as Spiderman (Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland), two successful animated ‘multiverse’ films and three villain-centred spin-offs, Venom, Venom: Let There Be Carnage and Morbius. You can hardly blame Sony Pictures for combing the comic books for supporting characters to exploit. You can’t fault them for trying something a little different either, that is, a film in which skills traditionally exhibited by men – ambulance driving, software expertise, skateboarding – are demonstrated by women. Madame Web has an extra element, premonitions, more of a curse than a superpower, though at one point Cassandra returns to the land of her birth, the Peruvian Amazon, and is told that it has infinite possibilities. Not according to the box office numbers, it doesn’t.

At its heart, Madame Web features four young women in the run who at one point end up in the forest. Cassie tells them she will leave them behind to check some stuff. ‘Don’t do dumb things,’ she insists, somewhat too late for many concerned. ‘Three teenage girls alone in the forest,’ replies Julia (Sydney Sweeney), the bespectacled of the three, ‘That’s the start of every horror film you’ve ever seen.’ OK, I blame the adult that let her watch The Evil Dead. I cannot remember seeing a superhero film quite like this. It’s like a remake of Adventures in Babysitting with a disturbed supervillain.

I can’t say that I thoroughly enjoyed Madame Web, but there is plenty to like in it and a very good excuse for its semi-serious tone. The internet. There is a somewhat over-influential group of people who are obsessed with the lore behind superhero movies, which is the definition of having too much free time, or perhaps white privilege. So we learn that Cassie works with Ben Parker (a charismatic Adam Scott) who is of course the uncle of Peter Parker to be, only he hasn’t been born yet. Peter’s mother, Mary (Emma Roberts) is expecting a child, and we know who he will be, while Peter’s father is overseas on some business ‘in Mumbai or Shanghai’ or, we imagine, High School High. So Cassie becomes Peter Parker’s witchy godmother, or something like it, if only this strand of the franchise is played out. Clarkson’s film doesn’t feature celebrity cameos or the post credits sting – the bit that follows the end credits that teases another movie. But it does include prominent product placement of Pepsi Cola, Mountain Dew, and a poster advertising Beyoncé’s album, ‘Dangerously in Love’, released June 23, 2003.

Madame Web is about adjusting to life without a mother in the big city. ‘I didn’t turn out so bad,’ Cassie unconvincingly tells her three charges, latch-key science nerd Anya (Isabela Merced), rebellious rich girl skateboarder Mattie (Celeste O’Connor) and the aforementioned Julia. Johnson is otherwise utterly believable as a young woman who takes umbrage about being described on the radio as ‘in her early thirties’ and is uncomfortable being obligated to save the lives of the three girls who are destined to kill Ezekiel and end up – if the pre-credits sting is to be believed – as superheroes. Just as Cassie can stop bad things from happening, so it seems can ticket receipts. Sweeney’s Julia is the most vulnerable of the three, genuinely wanting to place her trust in Cassie and placing her glasses back on her face during pensive moments.

Still courtesy of Sony Pictures

Cassie experiences a version of reality, be it her partner saying ‘good catch’ at the scene of a medical emergency or a pigeon slamming itself against her window. Then she is given a tiny opportunity to change it. She experiences time twice or else gets ahead of herself, which in a relatively generic film is a superpower shared by the audience. However, she only sees bad things in advance, like a second-string film critic. This gives her the option of taking preventative measures, whereas the second-string film critic is jaded by such bad movies.

The script is credited to five writers, Kerem Sanga, Burk Sharpless, Matt Sazama, Claire Parker, and Clarkson herself. Parker, a British producer turned writer, who worked on the time-travel series, Life on Mars, was tasked, I would guess, to give the film a basis in reality, hence the somewhat cruel baby shower in which female guests share a nice memory they had with their mother – Cassie’s paper is blank. Cassie explains how her mom died giving birth in one of the world’s most inhospitable environments (industry test screenings notwithstanding), souring the mood. ‘It’s super rare,’ she adds by way of apology.

The majority of Marvel superhero movies involves a villain of dubious motivation acquiring a powerful weapon of even more dubious provenance and threatening the human race or some other dubious species.  Tahar Rahim’s Ezekiel complains of having a bad start in life, which is of course in heavily subsidized French cinema, which accounts for his disconnect, Rahim having starred in Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet. Ezekiel gets the weapon – a spider – early so the rest of the film is about dealing with his fear of justice, which makes him surprisingly like Vladimir Putin. ‘With great power comes greater paranoia,’ ought to be the mantra, rather than ‘with great responsibility comes power’, as Cassie is advised by her Amazon explainer, who then pushes her into a pool of water for her to finally ‘get it’.

Early in the film, Cassie’s mother, Constance (Kerry Bishé) tells Ezekiel that he really ought not to steal the spider before he shoots her. Then a SWAT team of masked tree climbers whisks her to safety rather than recover the spider. I’m not exactly sure about their priorities. Clarkson films the early scenes with a series of crash zooms for dramatic effect, taking this style into the ‘thirty years later’ New York scenes of Cassie driving through the busy New York streets and being ‘flipped’ by Mattie. ‘Who flips an ambulance?’ she asks rhetorically. Given a drawing by a grateful young boy, whose mother she had driven to the hospital, Cassie has a problem processing it. ‘It’s cardboard. I can’t even fold it,’ she tells Ben, expressing her super awkwardness. In her top floor apartment, she puts it in a suitcase featuring her mother’s old stuff. Why? So the audience can be introduced to her mother’s notebooks and Peruvian souvenirs.

Still courtesy of Sony Pictures

Rescuing a motorist named Robert, Cassie finds herself trapped in a car that falls into the Hudson River, where she experiences premonitions of the rest of the film. She is fished out by Ben, who tells her that she went into cardiac arrest. Scientific fact: when you go into cardiac arrest, your immediate memory is wiped.

Failing to save one of her colleagues from an accident that she foresees, Cassie boards a train to Poughkeepsie for his funeral, only to be blasted with images of Ezekiel strangling the three teenage girls, Anya, Julia, and Mattie who board her train. She then persuades them to leave the train and board another one to escape Ezekiel, who then dons latex and dispenses with a squadron of cops on the platform of Grand Central Station.  Cassie then steals a cab and puts her driving skills to the test.

The action set pieces are moderately thrilling with the electrified paddles of an ambulance used to shock Ezekiel off the room in one scene. Cassie drives a vehicle at Ezekiel on two occasions, firstly preventing an attack at the Four-Star Diner while the three girls are dancing on the table to Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic’ – that’s what diner-baked cherry pie will do – and then through a Calvin Klein billboard. Vehicles, we discover, stun rather than stop Ezekiel. Meanwhile, the Four-Star Diner, to which Cassie returns to ‘talk’ to Ezekiel – loses one of its stars. There are no police to preserve evidence either.

Cassie is judged to be a kidnapper and has to stay off the grid. She and the three girls go into hiding, first in a motel and then at Ben’s house. ‘I can’t pretend that I know what’s going on,’ Ben remarks by way of making his excuses, evidently having not watched the news. Mary’s waters break and Ezekiel is alerted to the girls’ location. ‘Set all [traffic] lights to green,’ Amaria is ordered. For her part, Amaria wears a series of metal necklaces that infer she is a prisoner. I would suggest that not all future Spiderman spin offs will be so quickly greenlit.

The finale takes place at an abandoned former Pepsi Cola bottling factory filled with explosives, the scene of a previous emergency. You’d think they would remove the explosives, but whatever. Cassie calls in a ‘30’, which is code for air rescue, as each of the three girls is imperilled by Ezekiel. ‘You can’t save them all,’ Cassie is told, another Spiderman trope. It turns out she can be in more than two places at once, thanks to her web, but then has an accident affecting her vision.

‘I can see better than ever,’ she explains from a mechanised wheelchair, still leaving her junk mail downstairs for others to deal with, a complaint raised earlier in the film. Her adopted daughters bring back Chinese food. Maybe this time, the fortune cookies won’t feature misprints. Cassie is no longer able to drive, has three young mouths to feed, and is incapacitated. Worse, Mary and the baby don’t come over to visit.  Somehow, this is passed off as a happy ending.

I can certainly see the justification for the bad reviews that have greeted Madame Web. The film doesn’t exactly appeal to a family audience. I cannot imagine anyone buying a Cassie Webb action figure (except for collection purposes) but having attended successive screenings to catch the opening, for which I was late, I can tell you that it skews towards teenagers and early evening viewers and plays to sparser crowds by 20:00.

Reviewed at Cineworld Dover, Screen Six, Saturday 17 February 2024, 17:15 and 20:10 screenings.