"Madame Web": You Wish You Didn't See It Coming!
Alfred Hitchcock said “To make a great film you need three things- the script, the script, and the script”. Madame Web is the perfect example of what happens when those three things are missing. It doesn’t matter if $80+ million dollars. You have to stick to the basics!
With story and written by credits spread amongst five people, this exceptional film starts off with the typical back story exposition. A mother, pregnant and in search of a mysterious spider that possesses a healing power inside it, searches through the jungle with a guide/friend named Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim). Of course, something is going to go wrong and does, but not before she gives birth to a baby after being bitten by a spider. Years later, Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson) is thriving in NYC as an EMT. She starts seeing the future before it happens and can’t make sense of it. Honestly, it’s a little hard to follow for the viewer as well, but we can go for the ride.
Cassie (as her friends call her) starts to find purpose in saving three teenage girls from, you guessed it, the big baddy Ezekiel starts hunting them down to kill them. What we were sold in the trailer was Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced), and Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor) as spider-women. What we got was a thinly plotted chase thriller with action scenes sprinkled in. Character development is about as thin as a spider web. There’s just enough that you can see something, but the teenagers are reduced to stereotypes of the quiet one, pretty one and angsty one.
The one good thing this film shines a light on is the family that you choose versus the family that you’re born into. All of the women in this film have issues with their blood family, but are able to deal, heal and congeal as a unit with their new found sisterhood. Unfortunately, I don’t think this film knew what it was selling. If only the writers and producers could have seen the future like their main character. Perhaps we could have received the film we were hoping for.
Rating: D
