Madame Web

Grade: C-

The title character of Madame Web often has premonitions of the immediate future. This means that we see bits of scenes twice, many times – once when she foresees it, then again when it actually happens, or doesn’t, if she intervenes. I didn’t like them much the first time, but here we go again. It also eventually made me suspicious of everything I saw – wondering if this was regular action in the movie, or just another one of her visions, and we’d soon get an unwanted encore.

This is an origin story, set in 2003. Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson) is a 30-year-old paramedic in Queens. The film begins with a flashback to the Peruvian Amazon in 1973, where her pregnant mother – researching a unique breed of spider – dies in childbirth. We don’t find out exactly how baby Cassie got back to the states, or who raised her. She is followed by a villain, with intentions that weren’t completely clear to me. Only she (and as it turns out, three teenage girls she comes across on the subway) can see him. The villain has one of those movie assistants who spends most of her screen time cooped up in a dark office on a high floor of a skyscraper, looking at about 15 computer screens and giving him orders and instructions.

26-year-old Sydney Sweeney plays one of the teenagers, who act like they are 16 at most. If I wasn’t familiar with her body of work, it might have been fine. However, to see her go from starring as a 20-something adult in Anyone But You to one of three supporting immature teenage characters is jarring. She wears glasses and frumpish costumes in an attempt to youthanize herself, but it still doesn’t quite work. Honestly, I thought “why they would cast someone who looks distractingly like a young Sydney Sweeney in a movie that Sweeney is in already – and by the way, when is Sweeney going to show up?”

Johnson is an appealing actress with talented genes, as the daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith. She has some nice projects coming up; this summer, she’ll star opposite Sean Penn in Daddio – a dialogue-driven drama where they appear to be pretty much the only two in the movie. It’s a trailer well worth checking out. As for Madame Web, maybe less will be more, and it will translate better when her piece is more a supporting part of a larger movie, when one of those inevitably comes out.

Action films like to have a climactic fight scene in a warehouse with a lot of steam, sparks, and hanging metal catwalks. Madame Web’s big fight seems to take place outside a fireworks factory. Things blow up all around them, throughout the whole sequence. The whole affair has the quality of an obscure daytime TV movie, or an episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. I wanted Madame Web to meet Mr. Broom. Maybe she would see that coming.

Grade: C-