Movie Review: Madame Web Spins A Campy Web of Memes

Within 5 minutes of Madame Web, I just heard in my head: ¨It’s Morbin Time.¨ Going to the screening, with a bunch of critics, was like going to Six Flags with your cousin that hates rollercoasters. They were ready to bash the felt ridiculousness we all knew was coming, but Madame Webb spins a really good time by being entertainingly terrible or, what some might call….camp. Franky, I LOVED IT and it is out Feb 14! 

I was lucky to have sat next to a critic that, like me, grew up loving comic books. She understood that they are goofy, in essence. They are crazy, colorful, moving, but not, necessarily, in an existentially meaningful way: beyond whatever message you want to take from them. Immediately, you can feel in the air how our fellow critics would pan the writing and that is because its dialogues felt like they were straight from a comic page, which is not always a smooth transition. After all, comic book characters may be human, but they do not talk like real-life ones. They are just trying to get the story to progress, and you got the feeling, especially with how heavily Spiderman was insinuated but never named, that Madame Web was doing the same.

Dakota Johnson is a pretty solid Cassandra Webb, and my only wish was that she or, perhaps, the whole movie more fully embraced the snark and silliness of its comic book world. Immediately, I felt echoes of Raimi´s original, Spidey visuals and aesthetic in director SJ Clarkson´s touch, and I wanted MORE: something I would say, often, throughout the film. GIVE ME MORE CRAZY! Still, Johnson carries the film with a dry wit that is very charming and enthusiastically anchors what others might, too easily, deem as stupid. In simpler perspective, this film is about a pregnant woman who goes to Peru and finds spider people, of which one has visions that 3 New York teenagers will kill him with spider-powers and decides to travel where he KNOWS he will die and end their lives while we have no idea how they will actually get their powers. Oh, he also kills the pregnant woman who then births a daughter that has visions of those girls, as well. This movie is the definition of when bad is good, when fun is just insane, and that some films thrive on how you swim through their floundering. For all the exiting grunts and giggling bashes from the theater, everyone was entertained and certainly talking. 

I would see this movie with a WHOLE BUNCH of my funniest friends and a side splurge of cash for popcorn and a coke. It is truly the most unserious film, and that is why I left super excited for Kraven. I am SO READY for that movie, and a shirtless Aaron Taylor Johnson, after seeing Madame Web. It is going to be camp galore! Yet, I did leave the theater seeing why Sony is struggling in embracing the roots of the very Spidey world they, technically, originated. They are NOT MARVEL! They are Sam Raimi, and if you remember the original Spiderman films, they were camp and colorfulness. For GOD¨S SAKE! Tobey Maguire villain dancing is a classic internet meme, and Madame Web will CERTAINLY produce some quotes and memes, but that is its super-power.