Madame Web: Hopelessly tangled

Madame Web (2024) • View trailer

One star (out of five). Rated PG-13, for action violence and profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.16.24

This is the worst — and wholly failed — attempt at a high-profile superhero movie I’ve ever had the displeasure of enduring.

 

Cassie (Dakota Johnson, rear) and her three new companions — from left, Mattie
(Celeste O'Connor), Anya (Isabela Merced) and Julia (Sydney Sweeney) — are
terrified to discover they're being pursued by a powerful, costumed assassin who can
scuttle along ceilings.

I cannot imagine what prompted Sony/Marvel to green-light this pathetic excuse for a script by five credited hands: Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, Claire Parker, Kerem Sanga and director S.J. Clarkson. Nothing — not the premise, plot, characters or dialogue — works, or feels even remotely like how real-world people would behave or talk.

This filmmaking team clearly wished to create a franchise that would give teenage girl heroes an entry into Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, and that’s a noble goal.

 

To have squandered that opportunity so egregiously, however, is deplorable.

 

Why these writers chose to re-invent such an obscure Marvel Comics character also is bewildering.

 

Cassandra Webb — aka Madame Webb — has occasionally scuttled around the fringes of Spider-Man comics since her debut back in November 1980. She’s a “precognitive clairvoyant” who gets unexpected flashes of near-future events, and therefore is able to change them, ideally for better outcomes.

 

But this numb-nuts script by Clarkson et al ignores most of that, instead setting this story’s events in an alternate universe that apparently lacks Spider-Man and all the other familiar Marvel superheroes.

 

Instead, a brief prologue introduces the very pregnant Constance Webb (Kerry Bishé), as she searches the Peruvian jungle for a rare spider, whose venom is reputed to have powerful healing and enhancement properties. She’s accompanied by bodyguard Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), who may as well have the phrase “actually a murderous opportunist” tattooed on his forehead.

 

Rahim has done better work in other films, but Clarkson clearly couldn’t inspire him here.

 

Sure enough, Sims shows his true colors once Constance finds one of the spiders; she’s mortally wounded in the subsequent scuffle. Sims gets away, while Constance is scooped up by — I’m not making this up — a hitherto-only-rumored tribe of web-garbed individuals with superhuman strength and agility, courtesy of the multitude of those same spiders with whom they’re sympatico. 

 

These guys carry her off to an underground grotto, and successfully deliver her baby daughter; alas — despite a helpful bite by one of the spiders — Constance dies.

 

Honestly, it’s hard not to laugh. The webby costumes are just silly, and their tree- and vine-hopping swiftness is ridiculously overstated.

The Mauritanian: A disservice to history

The Mauritanian (2021) • View trailer

2.5 stars. Rated R, for violence, profanity, and grim scenes of torture

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.5.21

Many stories demand to be told.

 

Some are so important, that it’s crucial they be told well.

 

After having gained his trust, defense attorney Nancy Hollander (Jodie Foster) begins
what will become a lengthy, seemingly impossible battle to free Mohamedou Ould Slahi
(Tahar Rahim) from his Guantánamo Bay prison.

That simply isn’t the case with director Kevin Macdonald’s oddly flat handling of The Mauritanian, adapted from Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s best-selling 2015 memoir, Guantánamo Diary. It’s available via Amazon Prime and other streaming services.

 

Under the authority of the United States’ post-9/11 “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists” resolution, Slahi, a Mauritanian citizen, was arrested in November 2001; he subsequently was sent to Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp in August 2002. He remained there, without charge, until finally being released on Oct. 17, 2016.

 

Although some probably will argue this point forever, Slahi’s sole “crime” appears to have been guilt by association: most critically, a) a chance call accepted from Bin Laden’s phone; and b) having allowed an al-Qaeda recruit to spend one night at his home. There’s never been any indication that Slahi knew the man before that evening, or ever saw him again.

 

On said “evidence,” Slahi was accused of having recruited the men who flew the planes into the World Trade Center … which obviously didn’t sit well with the interrogators and Guantánamo soldiers charged with extracting a “confession.”

 

This film’s screenplay — by Michael Bronner, Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani — bounces between these 2002 events and ’05, when Slahi’s case comes to the attention of renowned defense attorney Nancy Hollander (Jodie Foster). She was an apt choice, possessing the necessary security clearances, and having defended Irish clients against charges of terrorism.

 

Hollander is assisted by the much younger Teri Duncan (Shailene Woodley), depicted here as enthusiastic, fresh-faced and rather naïve. (That’s likely unfair to the actual Duncan; the screenplay also omits a third defense attorney, Sylvia Royce, and assigns some of her involvement to Duncan.)