By most metrics, the convoluted comic-book movie is dead on arrival, but those with a love of camp may enjoy it, especially since its star seems in on the joke.
Once upon a time, comic-book movies used to be camp, riding the line between silliness and sincerity that would suit the cinematic adaptation of a slim, illustrated story about superheroes and their exploits. But around 20 years ago, the superhero industrial complex rejected camp, becoming dark and gritty, then sarcastic and flip, then cycling back to wholesomely earnest again for a time. However, in today’s moment of waning superhero enthusiasm with audience fatigue setting in, it seems there’s an opening for comic-book movies to be stupid again — stupidly fun, especially if “Madame Web” can tell their fortunes.
To get a little pretentious about this latest ultra-silly Sony Marvel movie, Susan Sontag would have loved “Madame Web.” Or maybe she would have found it offensive, but either way, it perfectly fits the rubric Sontag lays out in her famed 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” because, to borrow her phrase, “Madame Web” is a comic-book movie “in quotation marks.”
It is also the purest form of camp in that it is unintentionally so; certainly director and co-writer S.J. Clarkson, the maker of dozens of television episodes, including the two Marvel series “Jessica Jones” and “The Defenders,” didn’t intend for “Madame Web” to be as ridiculous as it is. Two of the credited writers (there are at least four) are Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, who also co-scripted the last baffling Sony Marvel movie, “Morbius,” which was meme’d into infamy in 2022. They’re responsible for the film’s campiness, in that the dialogue on display here is laughably cumbersome and unnatural.
