“Let’s try that again.”

Cassandra Webb

Let’s not, and say we did. Madame Web is Sony’s second big budget disaster in its attempt to build out a Spider-man spin-off universe and, for a woman who can see the future and correct mistakes, Cassandra Webb perhaps ought to have arrived before superhero fatigue set in. That alone is no excuse given Sony’s animated success, but audiences have no patience for a muddled and uninspired comicbook origin story that is, ironically, so focused on the the future that it forgets to be interesting in the present. 15 minutes into the film, we see an intriguing glimpse of three super-powered women killing the villain in a recurring a dream that haunts him. That promise (heavily featured in the marketing) is never realised; instead, Madame Web has Cassandra babysitting three teenage girls who might be relevant in another movie. The film has a habit of killing off characters before we have any connection to them, neutering the impact, while Ezekiel’s dialogue is too overwrought to be threatening (“it’s a good thing you had no idea today was the day you were going to die”), worsened by distractingly bad ADR. The action cinematography was nauseating within the first ten minutes, relying on repeated shaky cam and rapid cuts. In fact the only element of subtlety is a coquettish refusal to speak Peter Parker’s name despite myriad heavy handed references (“Mr Ben Parker here did all the work”). It is rare for a Hollywood blockbuster to underwhelm in every aspect of its production but such is the case here — Madame Web ranges from bland to incompetent without the benefit of being enjoyably awful.

3/10