Madame Web review: A baby shower for the unborn Peter Parker ranks among the stupidest moves in comic book film history

They’ll be laughing at this one for decades. Awkward, sloppy, staggeringly incoherent, there is little evidence to suggest that anyone involved in Madame Web knew what they were doing. The catastrophe extends all the way to the top of the queue.

Dakota Johnson, struggling to hide her disinterest from the outset, takes an inherently awful screenplay and somehow makes it worse. Sydney Sweeney wears the look of a performer who forgot to learn her lines. Meanwhile, Tahar Rahim, the charisma-free villain of this cack-handed superhero tale, is forced to compete with some hideous post-production interference. The screen is fine; the projector isn’t broken, and the speakers are correctly fixed – it’s just bad overdubbing. Like, really, really bad. Sony did not arrange an advance press show for critics – I can see why.

What, you may ask, is Madame Web? Comic enthusiasts will tell you she’s a mutant clairvoyant, a beloved staple of the Marvel cannon, and a helpful chum to your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man.

​For the uninitiated, the cinematic version exists in some far-flung corner of Sony’s so-called Spider-Man Universe – which is to say that this bafflingly disorganised feature has nothing to do with the Tom Holland Spidey pictures. But it might be a distant cousin to the decrepit Venom franchise. Or something.

It matters as much to me as it does to anyone else in this baggy, bewildering film. Squint your eyes and – if you’re lucky – you will just about make out the plot.

A preposterous epilogue introduces Constance Webb (Kerry Bishé), a poorly sketched scientist researching spiders in the Peruvian Amazon. The year is 1973 and a pregnant Constance is obsessed with rare arachnids and their alleged healing powers. Why, exactly, we’re not entirely sure – but everything goes sideways after Constance’s moustachioed explorer pal, Ezekiel Sims (Rahim), shoots her in the chest, steals her magic spider jar and leaves her for dead.

Luckily for Constance, the magical Amazon spider people show up (stop giggling down the back) to save the baby. Fast-forward 30 years, and Cassie Webb (Johnson) is all grown-up. Our moody protagonist knows very little about her mum, and why she died chasing spiders in the jungle. Cassie isn’t really a people person, but hey, she’s a New York paramedic – a real-life superhero without the stupid costume.

Her one and only friend at work (Adam Scott’s Ben Parker) thinks there’s more to Cassie than meets the eye, and he might be right. Across town, meanwhile, the slippery Mr Sims appears to have used his magical spider power to acquire a vast fortune. Alas, our grumpy baddie is haunted by nightly visions of his own death.

Sims, it appears, will die at the hands of three Spider-Women, and so he makes it his mission to find them before they find him. What he doesn’t count on, however, is a stranger messing with his plan and, following a near-death experience on the job, Cassie acquires powers of her own.

She can see into the future, which means she knows exactly what’s going to happen to the aforementioned Spider-Women (Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O’Connor and Isabela Merced). I’d love to tell you more, but I might die of boredom.

​Some Marvel fans might appreciate the Ben Parker subplot. Mr Scott is, essentially, playing a younger, sexier Uncle Ben from the Spider-Man flicks. However, the inclusion of a story in which Ben and Cassie attend a baby shower for the unborn Peter Parker, ranks among the stupidest moves in comic book film history.

Spare a thought for SJ Clarkson, the British filmmaker tasked with managing this sorry, pitiful exercise in blockbuster entertainment. Her film boasts no less than five screenwriter credits (always a troubling sign), and occasionally looks and sounds as if it is being edited in front of us.

The relentless product placement is hilarious (three cheers for Pepsi, the film’s fizziest co-star). The action sequences are useless, the dialogue is all over the place, and the grainy special effects appear unfinished. It’s an ugly, toneless film, a superhero feature without charm, without humour, without spectacle.

It seems unfair to point the finger at its leading woman – but Johnson is genuinely appalling. She looks fed up here, and guess what? I know the feeling. A film so bad, it would almost put you off going to the cinema.

One star

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