Madame Web and all the images you see in this review are owned by Sony Pictures Releasing
Directed by SJ Clarkson
Sony’s attempts at building their own Marvel mini-verse out of the Spider-Man license have yielded mixed results, to say the least. I, for one, appreciated the two Venom films for their shameless swagger and playful take on the material, but Morbius was an absolute bore and I never thought Kraven was a good idea unless they got Sharlto Copley to play the part. Now we have this slice of the expanded Spider-Man canon that Spider-Verse hasn’t laid a claim to, but hey; at least this one has actual Spider-People in it which you’d think would be a bare minimum requirement to making a Spider-Man connected movie. Is this the film to finally get the Sony-Verse on track and competing with Marvel, or are those dreams as lofty as Warner Bros bringing back the Snyder-Verse? Let’s find out!!
Cassie Web (Dakota Johnson) is living a normal, unassuming thirty-year-old life in the early 2000s as she drives an ambulance with her best friend Ben Parker (Adam Scott) and… well, that’s about it. She does have a mysterious past as her mother died in Peru while researching spiders, but hey, what Gen Xer doesn’t have some weird stuff going on with their parents? Cassie just wants to get through life one day at a time without making any strong connections or getting wrapped up in other people’s problems, but fate has other things in store for her as a near-death experience starts to awaken future-seeing powers that are a real drag when you’re just trying to get through your shift. With great power comes great responsibility, however, as she sees three young women (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O’Connor) getting attacked on a train by what appears to be an Evil-Spider-Man (Tahar Rahim), though since this takes place before Spider-Man, I guess that would make Spider-Man the good version of whoever this is, and manages to save them while putting a target on her own back for the Spider-Jerk. Why are these three girls so special that they incur the wrath of the Wicked Web-Head, and what role does Cassie have to play in this clash of destiny? Does the Not-So-Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man hold the secrets to Cassie’s past that she’s been desperately searching for? If Spider-Man doesn’t exist yet, does a guy walking on walls and wearing a spandex bodysuit even read as a spider?
The internet has already spewed its bile all over this movie, which is as wrong-headed as it is predictable. The movie isn’t good, but it’s also not that bad; certainly not the kind of bad that should be getting people upset. If anything, it hits a genuine note of campy fun that only works if you don’t know you’re hitting it. The flaws are certainly frustrating because you can see a good movie just underneath the surface, but there are baffling decisions that filled me with glee as the actors on screen tried to work around the nonsense that was being cobbled together on the fly. Dakota Johnson ends up bearing the brunt of this as she tries to hold this movie up like Atlas if he was also getting rocks thrown at his head. No emotional subtext can exist without her having to say it out loud, which I suppose is helpful for young audiences, but the lines are undeliverable, and you can plainly see Johnson’s frustration with having to say them. Still, at least she gets to deliver her own lines whereas Tahar Rahim has half his dialogue dubbed, and it’s as bad as the dubbing in The Snowman, a movie that famously went to theaters without the filmmakers shooting the entire thing. It’s obvious that there were problems at all levels of the production as you don’t come up with these solutions unless you simply have no other choice, which is rather galling given how much time and money they put into this and how hard Sony is trying to push its live action Spider-Verse.
With all that said, why don’t I hate this movie? Why am I still feeling positive about it, despite how critical I’ve been to better-made movies in the past? Well, it’s because the movie has heart. It’s cheesy on all levels, but a comic book movie without cheese is like a horror movie without blood; doable, but you question why that would be the starting point. There’s a sense of charm to the movie that belies its fraught production, and none of the movie’s flaws were enough to take that away. As stated, Johnson is doing her best to hold this together and the movie does have a solid idea for her character. She’s great at playing an awkward loner, and seeing her get thrust into this superhero nonsense was pretty hilarious. With just a small twist in the framing of the movie, this could have worked as something like a parody, where an average person reacts and mugs their way through a Superhero story they are not prepared to go through. Even some of the flaws feel a little bit intentional as the superhero costumes are relics of the early 2000s era of comic book movies, yet the movie already sets itself in that time period, which makes it feel at least somewhat self-aware. Tahar Rahim is playing the most clichéd villain in a long time, but the filmmakers do some really interesting stuff with him as Evil Spider-Man. Unlike other versions of the concept like Venom, Carnage, or even Miguel from Across the Spider-Verse, this one is specifically mimicking the presence and mannerisms of what we associate with Spider-Man from Sam Raimi films, and they were clearly having fun imagining a menacing wall-crawler. As badly put together as this movie was, I don’t get the sense that anyone was phoning this in aside from a few moments where Johnson looks checked out, and there’s passion in a lot of the movie’s elements even if the end product just did not hold together in the end.
This movie is a mess, but it’s endearingly so, as there’s no negativity or even much pretense to make it a truly awful movie-going experience. I was sitting four seats down from a mother and her young girl, the latter of whom was enraptured by the story from start to finish. That alone does not make this a good film, but I think of a lot of bad movies I’ve seen, and few of them would have that kind of appeal to even the most undiscerning viewers. We all have those cherished childhood movies that, in hindsight, were deeply flawed but still spoke to us in a way that nothing else had at the time. Whether that kind of nostalgia will exist for this generation or not is up in the air as streaming services and YouTube mean that kids have more options than ever, but I found this to be utterly innocuous and anyone getting riled up about it might want to think a little harder about why.
The Reviewers Unite 