I Watch Films: Madame Web

 

Madame Web

Cassie Webb’s mother went to the Amazon in 1973 while pregnant looking for a spider whose venom could cure various diseases. She was betrayed by her guide Ezekiel Sims who stole the spider and returned to New York. There the spider venom gives him powers, to climb like a man-spider, to envenom people with a neurotoxin and to have prophetic dreams of three spider-like-women who will defeat and kill him. He’s extremely rich and has access to various cameras and spy agency feeds, and employs a woman to find the three spider-like-women.

Now in 2003 Cassie Webb is a paramedic and ambulance driver; after nearly drowning she starts to have visions of the future, or maybe she gets second chances, not entirely clear. Despite her efforts to use the visions her co-worker is killed.

She has another co-worker, Ben Parker, whose sister is pregnant; Cassie, who holds a grudge against her mother for going to the Amazon despite being pregnant and dying is not good with her.

She has visions of the three young women, saves them from being attacked by Sims and then they go on the run in a complicated and rather silly set of events. It’s a loosely spider-person related superhero film!

Is this any good? No, no it isn’t. But that’s not especially important. It brings together bits of odd spider-comic related lore and characters, awkwardly setting them twenty years ago and stringing together action sequences and time-visions shown on screen in a variety of ways. It’s a film you can go to, watch, go huh, I enjoyed the bit where she drove the car through the billboard to hit the bad guy, and a couple of the future vision sequences were well executed, and then forget about it. Because they’re not going to be making this the lynch-pin of a future series.

Are they?

Watch This: Some occasionally fun, occasionally spectacular spider-adjacent shenanigans
Don’t Watch This: Increasingly desperate attempt to get some use of the Spider-Man rights, this time for the ladies