Madame Web

Although mortifying in terms of how the film splays itself, presenting the executive-level interference for all to see, Madame Web does offer a few stray notes of grim fascination. These blips amuse in ways beyond the reflexive chuckles associated with the distracted (presumably intended as neurodivergent) energy that Dakota Johnson brings to her Cassandra Webb, or an approach to dialogue that is so purely expositional as to be absurd. Director SJ Clarkson's film tips a different hand early, before it has even begun in fact, with a new Columbia Pictures logo that rushes through the various incarnations of the torch-bearing Goddess that have played ahead of the films distributed by the company over the last century. Embedded within this collage are several, gleaming black and white drafts, instantly evocative of the comic-strip serials synonymous with the studio's early years. Following this history lesson, Madame Web tumbles into a scenario straight out of those episodic, 1930s adventures: a middle-class white person snooping around in the darkest corners of South America then coming to a sticky end, but not before their offspring has inherited an animistic power-set from the secretive locals. This sequence - complete with a squad of Peruvian shaman, imitating Steve Ditko's web-head with bodies painted red and muscles wrapped with knotted vines - could set the stage for a knowingly trashy take on Spider-Man, one that dispense with teenage, masculine angst to concentrate on a quartet of plucky damsels and the skin-tight slasher pursuing them. To fully take advantage of that deliberately sacrilegious concept though you require the derring-do of an 1980s Italian movie producer high on The Terminator, not a sultan of straight-to-video like Lorenzo di Bonaventura.