It's good to see that, no matter what the travails of actual picturehouses, some aspects of the movie business do seem to have bounced back to something resembling the normality that was in place about five years ago. Currently on display in many cultural outlets, for instance, we have the most notable example of the critical pile-on to have taken place since Cats, just before the pandemic. This is when something happens to agitate all the film critics and they apparently start competing with one another to come up with the most entertainingly vicious take-down of a film – it's movie criticism as a sort of performance art, and what sometimes seems to be happening is that the actual movie in question gets forgotten about, at least in terms of objective commentary, and the emphasis is just on coming up with the zingiest or most withering put-down.

Currently going through all of this is S. J. Clarkson's Madame Web, which already seems to have become a byword for major studio franchise-wrangling at its most unspeakable. And, to be perfectly honest with you, while I may perhaps have given the impression that the critical pile-on phenomenon is somehow unfair or unjustifiable, in this case we may as well let the proper critics have their fun, for nobody else is likely to get any joy out of the movie.

The movie opens in darkest Peru in 1973, with heavily pregnant researcher Constance Webb (Kerry Bishe) looking for near-mythical spiders whose venom is reputed to imbue anyone bitten by them with superhuman speed and strength and the ability to stick to walls. She just wants it for medicinal purposes but it turns out her associate Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim) has other plans – though exactly what they are remain murky to the point of incoherence. He shoots the rest of the expedition and runs away with the spider. The local tribe of spider-fanciers turn up and notably fail to save Constance's life, but they do ensure her new-born daughter is safely placed within the New York City foster care system – unknown Peruvian tribes being famously diligent about that sort of thing.

Thirty years later everyone is listening to female-fronted pop and alt-rock and the baby has grown up into Cassie, played by Dakota Johnson with a mesmerising combination of listless indifference and bloody-minded determination to say all the lines and get the movie done without seeming like a diva. She is a paramedic who gets on with her partner Ben (Adam Scott), who also makes an heroic attempt to lift the material but generally comes across as a bit abrasive and isolated.

Naturally all this changes when she falls in the river while working one day and finds herself afflicted by precognitive visions (and a very real affliction they are, as the audience has to sit through quite long chunks of the film multiple times, first as precognition, then as reality). No sooner has she figured out what's happening than she finds herself the reluctant protector of three (actually quite annoying) teenage girls who are the targets of Sims.

What's his problem with them? Well, strap in: Sims has been having visions of the three of them, who will all at some point become a version of Spider-Woman, teaming up to kill him at some point in the next few years. So he has decided to get the murdering in first. Why would the three girls do this? Once again we are off into the land of murk, plot-wise – I would go so far as to suggest that on a very fundamental level the plot of Madame Web Makes No Actual Sense.

Then again this isn't really a surprise as this is another movie from the makers of the Venom series and the proverbially bad Morbius – the most damning review Madame Web has received is that it's 'even worse than Morbius'. All of this is the result of Sony wanting to exploit the fact that they still own the movie rights to all the Spider-Man characters even though they stopped making their own Spider-Man films ten years ago, because nobody thought they were very good. Madame Web isn't very good either – to put it extremely mildly – and this is mainly because doing a whole movie about the Madame Web character is a stupid idea.

The comics version of Madame Web is a blind old woman with mutant psychic powers and a chronic neuromuscular condition that leaves her effectively paralysed – she's essentially a plot device character who serves as a mentor and source of information for younger, hipper superheroes. Trying to retool her as a protagonist feels like a bizarre act of desperation, and there seems to be a further, very odd element of creative conflict going on here – there's a sense in which this movie seems to be an attempt to do a Spider-Man film without actually including Spider-Man, but it also seems to be actively fighting against this. This is most obvious in the plotline where Ben's sister Mary gives birth to an unnamed infant partway through the film. Yes, Ben is going to be an Uncle! Uncle Ben's surname is Parker, of course. It looks like the only reason the film is set in 2003 is to enable this gag, but there's no pay-off to it; the references to Spider-Man get as badly mangled as the line where someone basically tells Cassie Webb that with great responsibility comes great power. (Eh?)

Then again, the publicity for Madame Web is very insistent that this is a 'suspense thriller' rather than a superhero film (despite all the people sticking to walls and seeing the future and so on), and also that it is a standalone story rather than part of a franchise. Presumably this is why most of the Spider-Man references feel like they've been ruthlessly hacked back. It's another desperate-seeming choice presumably born of a growing realisation that a) superhero films aren't the licence to print money they were a few years ago and b) this isn't a very good superhero film anyway – the response to the trailer, which mainly consisted of people mocking the somewhat over-expository line 'He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died', led to the piece of dialogue quietly being snipped from the film as released. (I was looking forward to hearing it in context, to be honest.)

But this is still obviously a superhero film. Unfortunately it's exactly the kind of superhero film which has managed to get the genre in trouble recently – more concerned with franchise-wrangling and hyperdiegesis than in telling a coherent story with engaging characters and imaginative ideas. It's not even bad in the extravagant way that's sometimes fun to watch. Sometimes bad is just bad. This is a bad idea for a movie badly executed.

Also Showing. . .

. . . although not for very long, Mahalia Belo's The End We Start From, which is a bit like an old-fashioned British catastrophe novel (think John Wyndham or John Christopher) updated for the present day. Jodie Comer is on the verge of giving birth when relentless rain results in her house (and most of London) flooding; she and her partner (Joel Fry) take refuge with the in-laws but the non-stop storms and rising waters are tearing civilised society apart at the seams. . .

Speaking as someone who lives next to a river, I hope this isn't as prescient as it looks. It's an interestingly female-oriented, introspective take on this kind of material – often these stories get very macho and brutal very quickly; this one is more restrained and takes an almost impressionistic approach. Strong performances from a very good cast (Mark Strong and the Cumberbatch both make contributions), and the low budget is carefully deployed to good effect. Exactly what it's trying to say remains perhaps a bit obscure and you could argue it could use a bit more incident and a few less scenes of Comer and baby yomping through the countryside. But an interesting and worthy film nevertheless.

Awix

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