Madame Web

Weirdly enough, this has been one of the movies that I missed during the hiatus on this site that I’ve been most wanting to watch for a long time now. There’s just something about a universally disliked movie that scratches that itch and makes me curious about whether it’s actually bad, or if it’s just mediocre, or if it’s decent with some serious issues. And more often than not, I tend to like most movies that people think were bad. I enjoyed Morbius for the most part, so I was very curious to see where I landed on this movie. Outside of the general vibe, I kept myself pretty much in the dark about what the movie was actually about. I have vague memories of Madame Web appearing in the 90’s Spider-Man cartoon but I don’t really remember anything specific. I even forgot that she was blind until Cassie gets blinded at the end of the movie. I also kind of remember hearing about how the three Spider-Women don’t ever actually get any real scenes as their Spider-personas. But this movie really was a complete mess. It never really made sense as to why this was a story that needed to be told, as someone with zero Spider-verse comics knowledge there was very little for me to grasp onto for any of these future personas outside of Madame Web herself, the villain is ridiculously over-powered yet completely incompetent when it comes to anything involving Cassie, and no one has anything resembling a three dimensional personality.

Anyway, the film is basically an origin story for Madame Web who is more or less kind of like Loki at the end of his season 2, that is she is able to see infinite causality and is able to manipulate it to a certain extent. As this is an origin story it basically starts as her being able to see briefly into the future which manifests itself after she has a near death experience drowning in a river, or the ocean, some body of water. It’s not exactly clear outside of the fact that she is an EMT in New York City. But where she originally got her powers was becauses her mother was searching for a mysterious spider in the Peruvian amazon while she was nine months pregnant and when she finally found that spider, her security guard shot everyone including her so he could steal the spider for himself. Luckily the tribe of Spider-people who live in the rainforest intervened and tried to save her by having this special spider bite her, and while it didn’t save the mother, it did save her daughter as she gave birth before passing away. And somehow, this mysterious tribe of Spider-people trafficked the infant girl back to America where she was placed into the foster system and is now a normal, functioning adult.

Meanwhile Ezekiel, the rogue security guard who made off with the spider is now a little bit older and tells his entire backstory to this random woman who he seduced and brought back to his fancy place complete with a terrarium to house his fancy spider which is still alive despite the fact that most spiders only have a lifespan of a couple years. Apparently he has nightly visions of the day he will die as an older man at the hands of 3 Spider-Women, and needs the vast security network of the NSA to create a facial recognition program based on his memory of these 3 women, plus the technology to infer what they look like without their masks, PLUS infer what they look like roughly 10-15 years younger, and all this is being done by a single woman in front of a computer with a six monitor setup who has a brief almost change of heart when she realizes that these three women that Ezekiel intends to kill before they get a chance to kill him are just teenagers.

And if this story line wasn’t ridiculous enough after all of that, they add in the fact that Cassie has interactions with all three of these teenage girls before it’s revealed that they are important to the story. One is the stepdaughter to a woman that Cassie and her EMT partner save, one rides her skateboard directly in front of the Ambulance while it has its siren on and has the audacity to flip her off for almost hitting her, and the third happens to live in Cassie’s apartment building where Cassie overhears her talking with the landlord about her father being late with the rent but assuring him that her father will have it tomorrow. And when Cassie actually uses her powers to save them from her vision of their deaths as they happen to all be together in a single subway car, she eventually finds out that they are all basically on their own. The skateboarder rebel has rich parents who are always on vacation out of the country, the shy nerdy girl’s actual mother is in the psych ward while she feels like her father would rather be alone with his new family, and the Hispanic teen is literally on her own as her mother is dead and her father was mysteriously deported a few months ago. Oh, and for some unknown reason this entire movie is a period piece that takes place in 2003 for no apparent reason. Plus, Cassie’s EMT partner is named Ben and his sister in law is pregnant so Ben is about to be an uncle. Get it? Wink wink, nudge nudge?

This is an origin story that honestly reminds me of Unbreakable where that movie was intended to be the first act of an origin story spread out to be the entire movie. We see Ezekiel throughout playing this extremely one-note villain who is hellbent on killing these three teenagers and he has all this technology available to find exactly where they are as long as they go in front of any camera, he’s also able to intercept 911 calls and hack into the police radio. During their initial encounter, he takes out all of the police officers that are surrounding the teens along the subway platform and yet is unable to reach any of the four women at all despite basically being evil Spider-Man minus only the web-shooters. Plus, there’s an entire scene where Ezekiel is able to have a conversation with Cassie once he realizes that she is the daughter of the mother he killed, but it’s all through this future sight and then is never used again throughout the rest of the movie. Plus, Cassie is a single EMT who grew up in the foster system and yet she is able to get a flight to the Peruvian amazon on a moment’s notice despite the fact that it feels very unlikely that she would have ever travelled outside of the US before then and likely wouldn’t have a passport. And the three teens have very little personality outside of their one-dimensional stereotypes, they are practically just 3 living Macguffins. And when the film concludes and Madam Web leans into her powers and we get to see a flash of her future superhero costume, it is the most hideous and garish outfit ever. The one slight saving grace which is more attributed to the original character rather than this movie version of the character is the name Cassie which I am familiar with from the TV series 12 Monkeys which is a reference to the Greek Cassandra who was able to see the future, but unlike the mythological character, this Cassie is actually able to change the future based on her predictions unlike the tragic figure who was unable to change her visions as she was unable to get anyone to believe her. This movie is just such a mess all over the place, though it did have just a handful of funny moments. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.