The first was that its star, Dakota Johnson, promptly ditched her talent agency and moved to a new one – though of course that could have just been a coincidence. And the second was that an amusingly clumpy line of Johnson’s dialogue – “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died” – went moderately viral on social media.
Unless I fell asleep, said line has actually been cut from the finished product, perhaps from shame, though unfortunately, the others didn’t meet the same fate.
What an unreservedly hopeless film this is: a sort of two-hour explosion in a boringness factory, in which the forces of dullness and stupidity combine in new and infinitely perturbing ways.
Even Johnson, who managed to bring a bit of wit and zap to the Fifty Shades films, borderline sleepwalks through the role of Cassandra Webb – a New York ambulance driver who was bitten by a magical spider while in utero, and has since developed the classic spider-like ability of being able to see into the future.
These visions prompt her to protect three dreary teens, played by Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor, from Tahar Rahim’s Ezekiel Sims, a former spider researcher turned tech billionaire (okay) who also has the gift of spider foresight, and is now trying to kill the girls before his recurring dream of them becoming a trio of Spider-Women who hurl him off a skyscraper to his death can come to pass.
Dakota Johnson at the Red-Carpet World Premiere of Madame Web in Los Angeles, California. Photo / Getty Images
There is something inherently hilarious about a film in which everyone constantly talks about spiders yet almost nothing spidery actually happens, beyond Rahim’s character occasionally pulling on a black Spider-Man suit.
Speaking of which, something very odd appears to have happened to Rahim’s performance in the edit. Whenever his character talks, the French actor’s face is almost always off-screen, and on the very occasional moments it is visible, the lip-sync is about as convincing as in Shaolin and Wu Tang.
I kept wondering if Johnson’s “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died” might end up coming out of his mouth instead, but sadly it was not to be.
The script cleaves to the standard superhero origin-story format that has been done to death over the last 20 years, with no surprises thrown in along the way.
Even the process of Cassandra grasping her powers is drawn out to near-unendurable length: an entire half-hour passes before her first act of heroism, which is stopping a pigeon from hitting a window.
All in all, it’s a new low in a mini-franchise comprised almost entirely of new lows: Venom, Morbius, and now this. Extraordinarily, Sony has another two of these nightmares lined up for imminent release: Kraven the Hunter in August, and another Venom for Christmas. Perhaps if everyone laughs enough at the trailers in the interim, some bits of those might be cut too, and we can all save ourselves a few precious minutes.
