Review of 'Madame Web': makes its way towards primordial ridiculousness

Once upon a time, comic book movies tended to be camp, vacillating between silliness and sincerity, which would fit the film adaptation of a short, illustrated story about superheroes and their exploits. But about 20 years ago, the superhero industrial complex left the field, becoming dark and gritty, then sarcastic and trippy, and then going back to being completely serious for a while. However, in the current time of waning superhero enthusiasm and audience fatigue, there seems to be an opportunity for comic book movies to be stupid, stupidly fun again, especially if “Madame Web” can predict their luck.

To be a little pretentious about this latest ultra-dumb Sony Marvel movie, Susan Sontag would have loved “Madame Web.” Or perhaps she would have found it offensive, but either way, it fits perfectly with the rubric that Sontag establishes in her famous 1964 essay “Notes on 'Camp,'” because, to borrow her phrase, “Madame Web.” It's a comic. movie “in quotes”.

It is also the purest form of camp in the sense that it is camp unintentionally; Certainly, director and co-writer SJ Clarkson, author of dozens of television episodes, including the two Marvel series “Jessica Jones” and “The Defenders,” did not intend for “Madame Web” to be as ridiculous as it is. Two of the credited writers (there are at least four) are Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, who also co-wrote Sony Marvel's latest baffling script, “Morbius,” which rose to infamy in 2022. They are responsible for The Movie's Cheesiness, in the sense that the dialogue shown here is ridiculously cumbersome and unnatural.

But the most important element of the camp shown in “Madame Web” is the madame herself, Dakota Johnson, who has a supernatural ability to apply quotation marks to the reading of a line with the combination of her innocent blue eyes and a smile on her face. lips. , a skill she displays to viral fame during almost all of her press appearances. It's a performance similar to Michelle Williams' turn in 2018's “Venom” (another silly and fun Sony Marvel movie), in which the actress is in on the joke but also takes her role very seriously.

Is “Madame Web” a good movie? No. Is it hilariously delicious? Often. The film follows an obscure Marvel character who has the ability to see the future because she was bitten by a poisonous spider in the womb while her mother was researching spiders in the Amazon. For some reason, the year is 2003, and it probably has to do with the age of a future Peter Parker, that other kid famous for being bitten by a spider. Johnson plays Cassie Web, an FDNY paramedic in Queens whose main personality trait is “bad with kids.” The script attributes her social awkwardness to the fact that she grew up in foster care, after being born in a mystical grotto in Peru while her mother, Constance (Kerry Bishé), died in childbirth.

Constance, of course, was researching spiders in the Amazon, as she usually does, before her security guard, Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim), turned on her, shot the team of researchers, and stole the spider and its magical peptides. Although she is injured, Constance, who is very pregnant, is rescued by a secret team of indigenous Peruvian “spider men” known as “arañas”, but they can only save the baby's life.

Meanwhile, the evil Ezekiel hoards the spider peptides for himself and, 30 years later, is now a kind of dark, cursed Spider-Man, tormented by premonitions of being killed by a trio of brave spider women. He attempts to track down these future killers using surveillance technology stolen from the NSA, which is commanded by (wait for it) Zosia Mamet from “Girls.”

Cassie is having her own terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. First, she plummets into a river while saving a passenger in a car accident, triggering a hallucinatory near-death experience for her. She then begins to have terrifying visions and heartbreaking déjà vu, leading her to inadvertently kidnap three teenagers from a Metro-North train to save them from Ezekiel's dark Spider-man. To evade Ezekiel, she will have to harness the previously unknown powers of her peptide-enhanced mind.

As Cassie, Johnson is so convincingly strange that you can't take your eyes off her. She delivers every scrap of a line with her chesty voice and a twinkle in her eye. The other three girls, Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O'Connor, and Isabela Merced, well, they were clearly cast in a potential future standalone movie, which has to be DOA at this point. They're all a little awkward and stilted, and none of them work on the level of Johnson's galactic brain.

Sontag wrote that to talk about camp is to betray it, and she is right. It is impossible to persuasively describe the bad and good charms of “Madame Web,” whose appreciation requires the kind of sensibility that celebrates the unnatural, the artificial, the exaggeratedly “off.” Johnson understands it, and for those who understand it too, it's exciting to find yourself entangled in his web.

Katie Walsh is a film critic for the Tribune News Service.