Dakota Johnson leads Inert Spider-Man spinoff – The Hollywood Reporter

“Madame Web”

Sony pictures

There’s something incredibly frustrating about criticizing yet another underwhelming Marvel show. What can really be said about the ocean floor-level disappointments and expectations that mining for this intellectual property has created? Every year, studio executives excavate minor characters, cloak them in a fog of hype, and leave moviegoers to debate, defend, or ignore the final product.

Madame Web It is one of these efforts that was recently extracted. The film, directed by S.J. Clarkson and starring Dakota Johnson as a clairvoyant New York paramedic, has as much energy as an employee having an icebreaker during a company retreat. It’s an airless, stilted endeavor driven by a mechanical scenario (written by Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, Claire Parker, and Clarkson). Her lack of imagination would be astonishing if it weren’t so predictable. When Sony dropped the trailer a couple of months ago, early reactions were nothing short of brutal. Responses to the three-minute video summarizing the film effectively turned the obvious dialogue into a meme.

Madame Web It begins with a prologue that does little to defend the film from all the cynicism. In this chapter, we meet Constance (Kerry Bishé), a scientist conducting field research in 1973 in the Peruvian jungle during the last month of her pregnancy. She is accompanied by a cunning guide named Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim). “He was in the Amazon with my mother when she was looking for spiders right before she died,” Cassie (Johnson) would say decades later during her own journey into the past. After Constance and her team find a rare spider, a tragic turn of events leads to their deaths. Fortunately, her child survived.

Madame Web Jumping to New York in the year 2023, Cassie races an ambulance through the city streets while her partner Ben (Adam Scott) tries to keep an emergency patient alive. Their communication was quick and intimate, certainly a sign of how long they had worked together under such trying circumstances. Madame Web He doesn’t care much about what specific background might give his characters some depth. The film operates on a need-to-know basis, forcing people to explain themselves through inelegant, breathless exposition.

Early scenes lightly sketch Cassie’s life in New York. She grew up in a foster home and keeps a bag of her mother’s old photos, letters and diaries under her bed. She hardly makes plans, preferring to stay home with her cat. Johnson initially seems like a good match for the role. Cassie has a funny sense of humor, and many of her lines land thanks to Johnson’s deadpan delivery. The actress is strongest when Cassie navigates socially awkward situations with messy honesty; There’s a particularly funny scene where she lightens the baby shower mood. But when the film requires Johnson to step up his energy,… Fifty shades The actress stumbled.

After trying to save a man whose car overturned on the highway, Cassie falls into the East River. A near-death experience activates her clairvoyant powers and the film’s drama begins. Already a misanthrope, Cassie now feels even more alienated from society. She navigates the world with heightened senses and is disturbed by déjà vu. Clarkson does some experimentation here, using subtle effects and irregular angles to emphasize Cassie’s shifting worldview and state of unease.

While Cassie adjusts to her new life, Ezequiel searches for three teenage girls in the city. Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Anya Corazon (Isabelle Merced) and Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor) have nothing in common until Cassie begins seeing visions of their deaths. Cassie doesn’t know why Ezequiel is after them, but she knows she must save them. The reluctant socialite becomes the mother of three girls, all of whom realize that people in their lives have emotionally abandoned them. Madame Web He does not take advantage of the poignant potential of this realization; Most of these revelations are relegated to the level of corny exposition, and the girls never move outside the territory of their original characters.

The cat-and-mouse dynamic between Ezekiel and Cassie plays out routinely. If there is one thing interesting in… Madame WebIt’s how the film navigates the post-9/11 landscape of personal security. Through Ezekiel’s evil planning with his assistant (Zosia Mamet), Madame Web It shows how much privacy civilians have willingly given up — or taken by the U.S. government — all in the name of national security. It’s a rare satisfying element in a film that fails to deliver at every turn.