In Review: 'Madame Web,' 'Bob Marley: One Love'

Choose your poison: Generic superhero movie or ineffective biopic.

Madame Web
Dir. S.J. Clarkson
116 min.

As originally conceived by writer Dennis O’Neil and artist John Romita Jr. in The Amazing Spider-Man in November 1980, Cassandra Webb was a blind and paralyzed elderly woman on life support whose powers are entirely psychic. She could read minds. She could see the future. She could project herself in astral form. In other words, she could not act upon threats with the physicality of a traditional superhero, making her something like a Spider-themed variation on Professor X from the X-Men comics, only buried so deep on the Marvel roster that only the studio responsible for Morbius would take an interest in her. Only in Madame Web, Cassie is an able-bodied thirtysomething paramedic whose life-saving job expresses a yearning for the mother she never knew and a past she seeks to revive. 

The problem with Madame Web—okay, one problem among dozens—is that Dakota Johnson isn’t much of a mover. She might have been better-suited to play the original, elderly Webb, because her powers as an actress are rooted more in passive observation and curiosity than asserting herself in the action. She tends to operate in a  lower key, which in the wrong circumstances can read like boredom. Ditto Sydney Sweeney and Adam Scott, who are also in Madame Web. The entire cast, starting with Johnson, all seem like they’ve astral-projected themselves out of this godawful movie, like a baked Diane Keaton watching herself have sex in Annie Hall. There’s not only no evidence that anyone here cares about making this movie, but no apparent effort to even go through the motions. 

Before introducing Cassie, the film opens in the Peruvian rainforest in 1973, where her extremely pregnant mother (Kerry Bishé), a scientist, is on the hunt for a rare spider with healing abilities. Rumor has it that some spider-bit natives have achieved such power that they can zip across the treetops, but she’ll never know, because she’s betrayed by Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), her guide on the expedition. To put it succinctly, from Cassie’s perspective: Ezekiel “was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.” (That quote did not survive past the trailer, alas.) 

Thirty years later, after a traumatic event on the job in Manhattan, Cassie starts to experience Dead Zone-like visions of the future that she slowly brings under her control as Ezekiel resurfaces as a venom-fueled adversary. Ezekiel has visions himself of dying at the hands of three teenage spider-women (Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O’Connor) and Cassie just happens to have taken these young strays under her wing. She can anticipate his attacks on them and needs to figure out clever ways for the four of them to parry, so they can all go back to drinking ice-cold bottles of Pepsi Cola. 

Much of Madame Web seems premised on future adventures within the off-brand Spider-verse. Scott plays Ben Parker, the “Uncle Ben” that isn’t steamed; Emma Roberts appears as a pregnant Mary Parker who at one point hosts a naming game at her baby shower; and the three teens are nowhere close to growing into their capabilities. And so the burden falls on Johnson to carry the load, along with murky and cheaply rendered effects that flash forward in stuttering edits or branch out in web-shaped projections. There’s a sequence in a literal fireworks factory that makes good use of Cassie’s prescience on the go, but she and her wise-cracking charges never grow into a coherent or formidable team. They’re a half-formed piece of a half-assed movie. —Scott Tobias

Madame Web is spinning in multiplexes everywhere now.

Bob Marley: One Love
Dir. Reinaldo Marcus Green
104 min.

As brilliant as Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is, its parody of music biopics didn’t blow the lid off the genre’s cliches. Anyone who’s seen more than one entry can pretty much map out where a biopic is headed from the first frame to the last: the childhood trauma, the struggles against adversity, the montage-friendly giddy rise, the dark years, the humbled recovery. Yet when a biopic strays from formula, it sometimes reveals that those clichés exist for a reason. B0b Marley: One Love touches on several of the expected pivotal moments in the reggae great’s life and career but only briefly via the occasional flashback. Instead, the film focuses on a few key years, the time between his attempted assassination in 1976 and his return to Jamaica for the One Love Peace Concert in 1978. It would be a bold move if it worked. Instead it’s dull enough to make anyone nostalgic for the way such films used to be made.

The problem isn’t the casting. Kingsley Ben-Adir makes for a charismatic and convincing Marley and he’s well matched by Lashana Lynch as Bob’s wife and collaborator, Rita. And it’s certainly not the music. The soundtrack features Marley favorites in abundance. It’s a persistent timidity and lack of curiosity that deflates Reinaldo Marcus Green’s follow-up to King Richard. Both the assassination attempt and the peace concert, for instance, have ties to ’70s Jamaican politics and crime bosses. While One Love is under no obligation to be A Brief History of Seven Killings, the film provides no real context for the events. Green lingers longest on the recording of Exodus, the 1977 album Marley made after relocating to London. But as key as this album is in the Marley discography, this seems like a choice made to fill the time. And, as might be expected by a film produced by the Marley family, One Love presents the official story, never delving too deep into its subject’s dark side apart from one heated argument between Bob and Rita and fleeting allusions to discord and marital infidelity. It’s as deep as a dorm room poster. Good songs, though. —Keith Phipps

Bob Marley: One Love is in theaters everywhere beginning tonight.