I just saw Pepsi-Cola presents Madame Web (now streaming on Netflix, in addition to VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), and boy am I all tired. Honestly, I was exhausted before I even pressed play; the public speech before its release (“He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died”), star Dakota Johnson’s crazy (and certainly entertaining) press tour and her vociferous criticism from of the critics. And moviegoers after its release in theaters created quite a powerful roar. And so the bilious reaction to the “Sony Spider-Man Universe” continues to grow: It started with two very dumb characters. Poison movies, and continued with those of 2022 morbium, which made me think the series couldn’t inspire more ridicule. Stupid of me.
LADY WEB: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: THE PERUVIAN AMAZON, 1973: Madame Web’s mother (Kerry Bishe) finally finds the spider she’s been looking for: a spider that has some really surprising peptides, the kind of peptides derived from venom that, as the script tells us, can enhance the cellular structure. Let’s listen to the peptides that enhance cellular structure! She hoorays for peptides. She is also pregnant, but that doesn’t stop Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim) from shooting her, stealing her spider, and leaving her for dead so that some Peruvian arachnids known as Las Aranas can rescue her and take her to a magical cave for a magical bath so that can be bitten by one of the special spiders in the hope that those peptides can save her. It doesn’t work and she dies, but the baby doesn’t. Don’t you hate when that HAPPENS?
Now we jump to the year 2003, where we meet that baby of destiny, now all grown up: Cassandra Webb (Johnson), surely voted Best Bangs at a New York EMT several years in a row. She is a lonely person with a cat, and to show us that she is a lonely person, she talks a lot to the cat and sadly flips through old photos of her mother. Her best ambulance buddy is a guy named: Hold on to your hats, true believers! – Ben Parker (Adam Scott), who has transcendencemy friends, Big implications. One day, while she is attending (put the hat back on so you can hold it again), Mary Parker’s (Emma Roberts) baby shower, WHO could possibly be in your tum-tum? – and drinks an ice-cold can of Pepsi-Cola, she and Ben are summoned to a rescue scene that goes sideways and nearly kills her. While she’s dead for a few minutes, she finds herself in a shitty, ugly special effect, and after Ben resurrects her, she immediately says, “I just want to go home and see.” Idol,†because it’s 2003, yo.
The shitty ugly special effect was nothing, of course. Cassie begins to glimpse the future through confusing flash-forwards. This doesn’t happen all the time, only when very important things are going to happen, so yes, that means it happens precisely when the plot needs it to. At this point, the plot reintroduces us to Ezekiel as he sleeps with a beautiful lady, has a nightmare, and engages in the worst pillow talk ever: “It’s not a dream.” Someday they will murder me,” he says. His The visions are clear: Three Spider Women will eliminate him, so he attempts to find those women and eliminate them first, using computer composites and advanced surveillance technology that is so complex and impossible that the movie doesn’t. explain it, because it would be too difficult to do so convincingly. So we just kept going.
Who are these Spider Women, you ask? Well, they’re not Spider Women yet, just average teenagers: Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced) and Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor). One day, these three young women who don’t know each other end up on the same train as Cassie, who visualizes what is about to happen and somehow convinces them that her visualization is not the ravings of a lunatic. , and she saves them from an attack by Ezekiel, who is wearing a black Spider-Man costume. Fate, it seems, really is at work here. And fate will lead our heroines to a completely inscrutable end in a Itching and itching fireworks factory topped by a giant Pepsi-Cola sign, as it should be, since being a blatant advertisement is the only thing this film successfully achieves.
What movies will it remind you of?: Deep breath: you have Green Lantern, electra, The Fantastic Four (2015), The Fantastic Four (2005), Suicide Squad (2016)…time has not justified any of these losers. It’s time to add a new one to this hall of shame list.
Performance worth seeing: Johnson is really living his way through this. She’s been through it before, in the 50 shadeses, so by now I should be a pro at gutting it out. As an unapologetic DK fan, I just want to send him flowers and a nice card after this one. I can’t help but contemplate critic Gene Siskel’s famous criterion for judging a movie: “Is the movie more interesting than the same actors having lunch?” In this case, he would modify it specifically to put Johnson and Sweeney, facing each other, in a cozy dining room, having a sad staring contest over a piece of cake: the first to cry loses. That It would be much more visible than lady web.
Memorable dialogue: My favorite doozy in a script full of them: “There is not enough frictional force on the bare human foot to overcome gravity and keep it stuck to the wall, much less the ceiling!” says Anya Corazon, as anyone would blurt out without breath while trying to escape being killed by a crazy spider.
Sex and skin: None.
Our opinion: A few sudden bursts of involuntary hilarity do not save lady web of being unobservable, unobservable as a fox. The script is a series of incomprehensible narrative decisions that grow exponentially and result in a truly SENSELESS FLAP. There’s a scene in which Cassie tells her teenage protégés, “Don’t do anything stupid,” followed immediately by a reiteration: “Seriously, don’t do anything stupid.” Have you read this script? ? It’s made up entirely of silly things! They have no choice! One wonders if Johnson didn’t read it either, before he was hopefully paid handsomely for it. (Note: She probably read it. In a recent interview, she essentially said that this was one of those movies that seemed like one thing when she signed on and became something completely different afterwards. I knew it was a disaster. I knew The Speech was Here another handful of daisies coming, Dakota.)
I’ll try to be fair from here on out: criticism directed at the struggle to figure out the nature of Cassie/Madame Web’s powers falls flat if they are simply considered to be like Spider-Man’s spider. -sense, except, like, ‘n’ more complicated shit. Sweeney was cast in this movie before becoming the sex symbol sensation she is now, which explains why she (frankly) doesn’t get much screen time (it ends up working to her advantage). It might be fun to watch if you just went to the weed store, maybe it is. It could function as a warning to anyone considering getting hit in the face with a firework while drowning (I refuse to contextualize this statement). And you’ll get to experience the crazy, crazy circumstances surrounding Peter Parker’s birth. Other than that, lady web It’s a baffling, far-fetched mega-duper.
PS: Coca-Cola is better.
Our call: I wanted to like this movie. Scratch that: I wanted to like this movie. Simply back the FTD delivery truck into Dakota’s driveway and JUMP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic living in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
