Madame Web is actually Marvel-lite – Sony Marvel rather than Disney’s official MC Universe.
Sony is definitely the B Team, responsible for dumb stuff like Morbius and Venom. Generally comic book geeks don’t think much of them.
Partly it’s because they’re not very good – a tradition Madame Web certainly upholds. Partly it’s because they don’t stick rigidly to the source material, which often stretches back decades.
Dakota Johnson as Cassie Webb, a "baby-sitter with ill-defined powers". Photo: Screenshot
But it’s also because we may be getting a bit sick of comic-book movies, and most of the good stories have been taken.
There’s no way Madame Web - starring 50 Shades of Grey’s Dakota Johnson - remotely counts as a good story, or even at times a story at all.
It opens on Cassie Webb’s Mum hunting for spiders in the Amazon in 1973. Her fellow explorer is a chap with the sinister name of Ezekiel Sims. I can also tell you she’s about to have a baby.
Let’s meet Cassie, 30-odd years later in New York City. Cassie drives an ambulance, she attends an accident and ends up in the Hudson River.
She’s rescued by her old buddy Ben. Wait - Ben? Ben Parker? Wasn’t he Spiderman’s uncle?
Before we can tackle that feeling of deja vu, Cassie keeps having visions. Is she reliving the present, or is she slipping a minute or so into the future, you may or may not be wondering?
If Cassie Webb is confused, imagine how the rest of us are feeling. Particularly when we keep cutting to an older Ezekiel Sims - yes he’s back. He’s having weird dreams of three teenage girls in Spidergirl costumes all ganging up to kill him.
Wait, what?
Cut back to Cassie – come on, catch up everyone! – on a New York train and having her old premonitions.
Premonitions involving fellow travellers – three teenage girls all being attacked by someone looking suspiciously like an old Amazon explorer.
OMG. Stopping only to register that one of three girls is played by flavour of the month Sydney Sweeney of White Lotus and Handmaid’s Tale fame, Cassie goes back in time, rounds up the teen trio and herds them to safety.
Now my problem – you may be surprised I’m only picking one – is that comic-book origin films depend on a simple, easy to grasp situation.
I can’t even work out what Madame Web’s superpowers are. They bear very little connection to those of her obvious predecessor, Spiderman.
The premise of Madame Web seems to be “Baby-sitter with ill-defined powers”.
Ezekiel – who seems to spend a lot of time changing in and out of generic super-villain Spandex – chases the girls who may one day turn into Spidery super-heroines themselves. And Cassie keeps finding new way to protect them.
The original script, I believe, involved Cassie using her in-and-out-of-the-future powers to tackle a villain who’s trying to prevent the future Spiderman, Peter Parker, from being born.
Yes, it’s a shameless steal of the old Terminator plot, but at least it is a plot. This one spends the whole time jumping all over the screen, dodging the slings and arrows of outraged comic book fans.
Is the problem that a bad comic-book movie is untypical of the genre? I suspect the opposite may be the case these days.
