Ivan Radford | On 30, Aug 2024

Director: SJ Clarkson
Cast: Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor, Tahar Rahim, Emma Roberts, Adam Scott
Certificate: 12

When is a superhero movie not a superhero movie? Madame Web, the latest entry in Sony’s Spider-Verse, does its best to answer that question – even if sometimes it only leaves you with even more questions.

Dakota Johnson plays Cassandra Web, a paramedic who finds herself seeing into the future – albeit only by a couple of a minutes. These premonitions prompt her to see an optician, before leading her to the Amazon jungle where her late mum was researching a mythical breed of spiders – a one-two punch of bizarrely illogical responses in a film full of even more bizarrely illogical responses. It’s not long until Cassie, who doesn’t like kids, finds herself having to babysit three teenagers: Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Mattie (Celeste O’Connor) and Anya (Isabela Merced), something she does by driving them into the woods and leaving them there alone while she goes off to check her mum’s notebooks.

The babysitting of the teenagers is because they’re in danger from Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim), her mum’s former security guard who betrayed her to get his hands on the magical spiders. While their venom has given him super strength and Spidey skills, they’ve also led to him having nightly visions of three Spider-Women coming to bump him off. A heavily funded surveillance operation later and he’s tracking down the three teens before they grow up and track him down first.

If this is sounding a bit weird, that’s because it is – and, at times, that’s the best thing about Madame Web. With Jessica Jones director SJ Clarkson at the helm, it’s a superhero movie that’s more interested in being a dark psychological thriller than in saving the planet: everything here is wonderfully grounded in tiny details and small character beats, right down to the relatable fear of being stalked on a train by an unavoidable assailant.

It’s a shame, then, that the script isn’t also grounded in anything resembling common sense. Time and time again, the cast are lumbered with clunky, cheesy lines that telegraph moments from miles away – you won’t need psychic powers to foresee the significance of Cassie teaching her students CPR. Dakota has a knack for delivering dialogue in an almost flippant, natural way that does actually bring a refreshing touch to a comic book movie, while her young co-stars are having fun despite being giving no substance to work with. Adam Scott and Emma Roberts tease a new spin on Spidey’s Uncle Ben and Aunt May, but are swiftly forgotten in the web of understated silliness.

The result isn’t quite consistent enough to be good and isn’t consistently bad enough to be properly fun. The action sequences feel more tangible and practical than larger CG blockbusters, and the climactic set piece, following an exciting car chase, is the most impressively low-key finale since the first X-Men movie. But all that good will is astonishingly undercut by a honkingly awful ending that leaves you more baffled than intrigued.

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