What a Tangled Web

My plan was to watch Madame Web (2024) unironically. You may know that I tend to like comic book movies, even the ones that are objectively (?) bad. Let's see how well this works here.

It starts in the Amazon, where Madame Web's mother is studying spiders while pregnant with etc. Her guide is Tahar Rahim, a slimy sort, whose lines and their delivery are hilarioulsy inept. Fortunately for Rahim, they are also dubbed by someone else. Anyway, when she finds the rare whozis, he kills her and steals it, while an Amazonian tribe of spider-people whisk her away to give her a spider bite and deliver her baby. 

We cut to the present, 2003 for some reason. The baby has grown up to be Dakota Johnson, a hotshot EMT and ambulance driver, working with Adam Scott (who is supposed to be "Uncle" Ben Parker, but the movie can't really say that, due to rights). Helping someone out of a car crash, she gets dumped into the river, and experiences weird hallucinations - including the death of a co-worker. When said co-worker dies as she has forseen, she realizes that she has powers.

The next set of visions happen on a train, where Johnson sees Rahim attack and kill three young women. We know that he now has web powers himself, and believes that these girls will grow up to be Spider-Women and kill him. But Johnson hustles these girls off the train before Rahim can get them. She steals a taxi and takes them into the woods - and leaves them there.

The girls are Sydney Sweeney, a nerd with big glasses, Isabela Merced, a pretty Latina, and Celeste O'Connor, a rough black girl from a rich family. They hang out awkwardly for a while, because they were told to stay put by a crazy lady, and they are being chased, maybe, by a crazy guy. But they get hungry and head to a diner. 

There, they decide to pick up some guys and dance on the tables, you know, diner stuff, but Rahim shows up again, and so does Johnson. They get away, and Johnson heads to the Amazon to seek answers.

And so it goes. Johnson's precog powers mostly work like resets - something terrible happens, then there is a blink and she's back before it happens and she can prevent it. But she after the first few garbled visions, she doesn't even realize that she is in a vision until the reset. I guess this makes sense to the gamer generation - save points or whatever. It also makes interesting cinema. But does it make sense as a superpower? Also, the three major visions she has are all underwater, while she is nominally drowning. Are spiders known for their underwater activities?

The script is a mess, full of loose ends, non-sequiturs,  and obvious ADR lines. The three girls get almost nothing, even in the woods/diner scene where they are the focus. Poor Sydney Sweeney, but at least she has some name recognition. 

But oddly, everything else is pretty much OK. The cinematography is great or at least pretty good. The action, except maybe the last big fight in the fireworks factory, is up to modern standards. Johnson and pretty much everyone does a lot with what they are given. 

So I was actually able to unironically enjoy a lot of this. But also, it is so blatantly bad that it is easier to enjoy it ironically - just go ahead and jeer.