Madame Web changes the post-credit scene throughout the film

Mrs. Web is perhaps the most shameless superhero film of all time. Far from just the cash-in it seemed a few years ago when this movie headlined by an F-tier superhero was first announced, Sony’s latest Marvel offshoot is a two-hour post-credits scene, which only occasionally is made bearable by Dakota Johnson’s underrated talent for comedy.

(Ed. remark: This review contains mild setup spoilers for Mrs. Web.)

Madame Web turns out to actually be a woman named Cassie Web (Johnson). We discover in the film’s opening in the 1970s that Cassie’s mother was researching spiders in the Amazon while she was pregnant with Cassie. After a predictable betrayal, Cassie’s mother finds herself on the brink of death when a tribe of spider people (yes, there are spider people in the Amazon rainforest) save her baby’s life with special venom from a rare super spider. The film then moves forward to 2003, when Cassie is a paramedic in New York City and teams up with her best friend Ben Parker (Adam Scott). Yes, that Ben.

After Cassie literally dies one day while on a call to save someone from a traffic accident, she suddenly gains the power to see into the future for an indefinite period of time. Ultimately, this power leads her to save the lives of three girls, Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced), and Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor), from a strange man who she expects will try to kill them. to kill.

Cassie’s flashes forward in time are the most complicated part of it Mrs. Web, and surprisingly, also the best moments. Although they are often shot in confusing ways, edited together too quickly for viewers to really follow, and lack a visual language consistent enough to be clearly readable, they are saved almost entirely by Johnson, who responds to these short breaks from the fourth episode onwards. dimension with quixotic looks and truly hilarious sarcasm. Despite her uncertainty about the film during the press tourshe is by far the brightest spot Mrs. Web – at least if she doesn’t get buried under the wooden dialogue.

There are also flashes of promise from the trio of young women that Cassie tries to save, but the film somehow manages to squander the group’s remarkable collective charisma. Merced was surprisingly fun as live-action Dora the scoutO’Connor is one of the best parts of it Ghostbusters: AfterlifeAnd Sweeney is a real movie star. But Mrs. Web doesn’t seem to have any interest in any of them, never tries to get their reactions to anything, and rarely gives their jokes enough time to breathe or for the audience to laugh.

For all the wasted potential of Mrs. Web‘s heroes, the film’s biggest problem is its villain, Ezekiel Sims, played by Tahar Rahim in an astonishingly terrible performance from an otherwise gifted actor. Ezekiel appears to have Spider-Man powers, which he obtained by killing Cassie’s mother in the Amazon and stealing her special spider. This is one of exactly two things we learn about him throughout the film. The second thing we learn is that since the night he got his powers, he has had a dream that three women who also have spider powers will one day kill him, so he has made it his life’s mission to kill them first. In our glimpse of this dream we see that the three women are, of course Anya, JuliaAnd Mattieall dressed up as Spider-Woman variants from the Marvel comics.

These three ‘heroes’ reveal Mrs. Web‘s real cynicism: the entire film is just a back door pilot. When the three women line up for a group hero shot in Ezekiel’s dream just after pushing him out the window, they’re practically a poster for a hypothetical movie. Spider girls movie.

But Ezekiel’s dream sequence at the beginning of the film and a brief vision of Cassie at the end of the film are all we see of these three new heroes. They don’t get their powers in this movie, they don’t find out they’ll be heroes one day, they don’t even fight anyone. Mrs. WebIt seems like it’s nothing more than a dastardly attempt to blow up a cinematic superhero universe. It’s a trailer for the excitement that will one day come, assuming fans like (and pay for) this movie so much that it spawns a sequel or two.

Considering how many movies these days are just Trojan Horses for future films, that would almost be excusable, if this post-credits-tease-in-movie form were more interesting to watch. Director SJ Clarkson (Jessica Jones) can’t find any life for her action scenes at all. Almost all of them boil down to a routine, slow car chase. Even a brief stay in the Amazon leads to nothing more interesting than a flashback to the film’s bizarre opening scene.

Photo: Jessica Kourkounis/Sony Pictures

And the film’s climax takes place in an abandoned fireworks warehouse, which eventually turns into a CGI light show of sparks and rockets that somehow seem far too destructive – who would have thought fireworks could create a huge hole through a brick wall can blow? – and never too dangerous for our characters if they happen to be standing next to them when they explode.

But despite all the boring set pieces, poor exposition, and poor universe expansion, Johnson, Sweeney, Merced, and O’Connor still manage to find little spaces for their charisma to peek through. In the few moments when these four are left alone, such as in a scene where Johnson deposits them in the woods of New Jersey for safekeeping, they playfully bounce off each other with wit and charm. The scene is a sudden glimpse of the star power this film never bothers to show.

Honestly, all those little jokes should have been enough to keep this movie above the absolute dregs of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, laughable bores like Thor: Love and thunder or Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. But the sheer ickiness of it Mrs. Web‘s franchise building is impossible to ignore. In a just world, Mrs. Web would be the death knell for this kind of IP strip mining. But this year alone, there are two more Sony Spider-Man universe movies on the way Mrs. Web is just a brief glimpse into our own future demise.

Mrs. Web debuts in theaters on February 14.