This is the worst — and wholly failed — attempt at a high-profile superhero movie I’ve ever had the displeasure of enduring.
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| 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. |
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.
Anyway...
Flash-forward roughly three decades. Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson), having weathered a childhood in foster care, has become a skilled Manhattan paramedic. She’s a bit standoffish, really only comfortable with her partner, Ben (Adam Scott), and his wife, Mary (Emma Roberts).
The always reliable Scott delivers this film’s sole credible performance: a nice blend of integrity, kindness and wry humor.
Cassie recently has been experiencing odd flashes of déjà vu, wherein she re-lives brief sequences at random moments. She’s puzzled, particularly when impulsively opening her apartment window allows a pigeon to survive, after she previously saw it smash into the closed window and die.
Elsewhere, Sims has amassed fabulous wealth — we’ve no idea how — and, thanks to frequent injections of venom from the spider he stole, has strength and agility akin to the Peruvians. He also is able to fatally poison people with pincer-like fangs in his palm (say what?), which he uses to dispose of the world’s most naïvely trusting NSA agent, after bedding and extracted her ultra-secret mainframe access code.
Sims wants the NSA’s world-wide surveillance tool because, every night, he has the same nightmare of being killed — at some point in his future — by three arachnid-garbed superhero women. (One of them looks so absurd, that I burst out laughing during Monday’s preview screening.)
Sims’ solution: Kill their younger selves now, before they embrace their future roles.
To that end, he’s somehow able to extract their faces from his nightmares — I know, I know; you gotta roll with this lunacy — and feed the images to a surveillance network monitored by his talented hacker assistant, Amaria (Zosia Mamet), who apparently was born lacking ethics. She finds them.
Wonder of wonder, on this particular day, all three girls — who don’t know each other — board the same passenger train car as Cassie. She’s horrified to see a man (Sims) stride into the car and kill them ... but then flashes back a few minutes, to when all three get on the train, before Sims shows up.
At which point, panicked, she yells at them to follow her off the train ... and they do.
(Yeah, right. They obey a lunatic stranger.)
The rest of the film follows Cassie’s efforts to a) learn more about her precog powers; and b) somehow prevent Sims from killing Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Anya (Isabela Merced) and Mattie (Celeste O’Connor).
(From this point onward, Sims’ garb of choice is an ugly riff on our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man’s costume. If that’s intended to be some sort of inside joke, it falls flat.)
For the most part, the girls go along with Cassie’s increasingly absurd behavior, which we’re supposed to accept because they’re mostly on their own. Julia’s father’s new family doesn’t want her; the undocumented Anya’s father was deported six months earlier, and she (somehow) has evaded her apartment landlord the entire time; and smug, smart-assed Mattie’s parents work overseas and don’t give a damn about her.
Nothing these girls say or do is the slightest bit credible, thanks both to the idiotic dialogue the actresses are fed, and Clarkson’s inability to draw anything approaching persuasive performances from them. Junior high school drama clubs could do a better job.
Johnson isn’t much better. She’s far more adept at slutty femme fatale roles in stuff like 2015’s A Bigger Splash and 2018’s Bad Times at the El Royale, or the full-blown trash of the hilariously overcooked Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. Johnson’s go-to expression here is “bewildered.” She can’t even do panic credibly.
One gets the impression she had no idea how to handle this nonsense, and therefore didn’t try.
We also must suffer through an interlude that finds Cassie traveling to Peru, in order to find the spider-tribe and Learn Everything from the Yoda-like Santiago (José María Yazpik, and I’m amazed he didn’t crack up midway through his inane explanations).
Since this sorry script ignores everything else about reality, it’s also a hoot that Cassie somehow manages to instantaneously set up travel arrangements, fly to Peru, bus and hike to the right location, find Santiago, experience the spiderwebbish wonders of her myasthenia gravis (the scope of her powers), hike back to civilization, and fly back to Manhattan, all in a single week ... arriving just in time to intervene as Sims is about to succeed in his murderous rampage.
(She must have one helluva travel agent.)
At which point, I could do naught but throw up my hands in disgust.
Clarkson’s film concludes on a note that clearly anticipates multiple sequels ... which obviously never will happen, given how quickly this train wreck will tank.
Shortly after meeting the girls, Cassie briefly leaves them hiding in the woods outside the city, and sternly warns them, “Don’t do dumb stuff.”
In hindsight, that’s a hilarious line ... because they couldn’t have done anything dumber than signing up for this bomb.
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