Madame Web: The BRWC Review

17th February 2024

Madame Web: The BRWC Review. By Samhith Ankam.

Might be an AI generated prompt for a movie, but even the worst person you know can have a stroke of genius (let’s hope it’s an actual stroke, so Open AI’s SORA won’t allow creative work to fully be placed into hands of numbers-obsessed nerds) – the prompt for Madame Web is just the cast (Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney) and form (Superhero movie) but you’ll be surprised with how much fun they have with it. Dumpuary continues in full force.

Madame Web is bad, sure, but I still can’t help but appreciate how Sony is giving its flowers to bad form – easy funeral to be had here, but the edit feels like it is doing gymnastics to not let this movie fall apart at the seams. To feel the blood, sweat, and tears over reusing the neon “S” in the Pespi-Cola logo from the final fight in a montage earlier as a form of “foreshadowing” is so silly.

In a draft for my Argylle review, I mentioned that I was engaging with it with a perverse enjoyment – self-destruction is a form of satire to the most cynical person. The MCU as much as they’ve dipped in quality still feels singular in vision – Phase 5 has Kevin Feige employ quantity over quality in a pathetic attempt to keep us moving forward from Endgame, but really only felt like we’re running in place with diminishing results.

The Sony Marvel movies have thrived with this intentional desire to create camp ever since Venom has become a cult (?) classic (in this house it is!), and the lack of serial storytelling to these movies also allow it to never really reach the point of inanity. Even if it’s hit or miss, there’s loads of opportunity for perverse enjoyment. Lobster then, fortune cookies now.

There’s an origin story energy over every second of this thing, and as such never does it fully break out into CGI fights. Dakota Johnson as Cassie slowly starts getting visions of the near future after a near death experience and finds herself saving three innocent teenage girls — who are all neglected by their parents to some degree — from the villain who has visions of his death at their feet. A Final Destination imagining of temporal pincers — “what happened hasn’t happened yet” — which is just enough of an idea to allow this to float into goofy situations by accident/with minimal effort.

The villain at one point says something along the lines of “they are teenagers now but in the future…” which at once makes him reprehensible in ways comic book movies are scared of. Is it by accident that it’s antagonist is coded as a pedophile? Who knows, but it’s there. Not a single moment with the villain metastasized in any real way, his presence on screen is 99% shots of his back with obvious ADR, but I’m still gonna go out on a limb and say he has some of the cooler Spidey crawling moves in quite some time.

There’s a mundanity to the Deja Vu proceedings in here but it eventually leads into a Toxic by Britney Spears needledrop while Dakota Johnson rams into a Diner, comically named 4 star diner — they refuse to name anything in this movie unless it’s Pepsi. It’s all quite entertaining regardless because Dakota Johnson takes the piss out of her lines with the cadence of mom reading a book to her child, that the script itself is gaslit into thinking there’s something here.

It’s all in good fun; the other fate of not being above the text is you sink with it. Dakota Johnson makes it all click, helping Madame Web get as close as consciously created camp can get into feeling like unintentional camp, which is where it thrives.

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