Category Archives: 2024 Movies
Madame Web (2024)
What even is this movie and who is this for? I think the real answer is to help Sony’s bottom line, but that’s generally the real reason for most studio blockbusters, the opportunity for the parent company to make more money. Sony has the rights to Spider-Man and they’re not going to let those things lapse, and while Marvel is shepherding the Tom Holland-lead Spider-Man franchise, Sony is left to their own devices to build out the Spidey universe with lesser-known solo vehicles meant to launch an interconnected web of Spidey’s rogues gallery. It’s about growing more franchises, and it worked with 2018’s Venom, a favorite Spidey villain with a sizable fan base and benefiting from the goofiness of its execution with Tom Hardy and company. It didn’t work out for Morbius in 2022 because nobody cares about Morbius as a character, just like nobody cares about Kraven the Hunter as a character (coming August 2024!), and just like nobody cares about Madame Web, who wasn’t even a Spidey villain and instead an old blind lady that saw the future. The far majority of Spider-Man villains are only interesting as they relate to Spider-Man, so giving them solo vehicles absent Spider-Man is a game in delayed gratification. Madame Web is the latest in this misguided attempt to create an enriched outer circle of brand extension. It’s a promise of a continuity of superhero movies that will never come to pass. It’s a bland return to early 2000s superhero heroics with some substantial structural flaws to its own tangled web.
Cassandra “Cassie” Web (Dakota Johnson) is an EMT in New York City and frustrated by her humdrum life until after an accident she starts seeing the future. You see her mother was researching spiders in the Amazon before she died, and she was researching them with Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim) who killed her because he needed a special spider with special properties. Her dying mother gave birth to Cassie thanks to some… mystical Amazonian spider-people? It’s rather confusing but so are Cassie’s visions. A trio of young students (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor) is in danger of being killed by a 30-years-older Ezekiel, so she takes it upon herself to save them, as they one day will become Spider-laden superheroes themselves. This Ezekiel, however, has super strength, agility, and the ability to walk on walls, so overcoming a Spider…man’s abilities might be too much for one EMT driver/psychic.
This movie is more Final Destination or That’s So Raven than a big superhero adventure, and that leads to lots of structural and narrative repetition. Cassie’s power involves her getting glimpses of the future, generally warnings of things to avoid or to intervene. It also makes for a very annoying structure because the movie never gives you clues about what is a vision and what is the real timeline of events. This leads to many repetitions of scenes and fake-outs, and after a while the story feels like it’s mostly jerking you around as well as treading in place. We don’t really know why these flashes happen and what larger meaning they may have. They just happen because the plot needs them to, and so they do. Early on, Cassie gets a vision of a bird flying into her window, and she chooses to open the window, signifying that she can avoid these fates. Why couldn’t Ezekiel Sims think likewise? He’s devoted his whole life to killing these mysterious girls because they’re destined to murder him, but if he’s known for years, why not strike when these girls were younger and more vulnerable, Skynet-style? Or maybe try just not being evil too? I guess that one was too difficult for him as he’s cryptically profited off his Amazon spider steal. More work needed to go into the story to make these characters important and for the fake-out scenes to feel more like horror double-takes. It just gets tiring, and you’ll likely start second-guessing anything of import is merely a vision about to rip away the consequences.
I think a big problem is our protagonist. She’s just so boring and we don’t really understand why she’s so compelled to save these three girls more than anyone else. Her entire back-story with her mother is merely the setup for how she might have super magic powers to kick in at a convenient yet unknown combination of elements and to provide motivation why she might want to kill Ezekiel. It’s all so rudimentary and mechanical, designed just to supply enough connective tissue of plot. As an EMT, finding out how to better save lives could be really useful, although I wish the movie had the gall to make her disdainful of her job beforehand and actively bad at saving lives so that way it would feel like the universe was interjecting and saying, “Here, be better.” You would think if she’s trying to prevent death, and especially the deaths of the people she knows, that it might kick in for her to warn a couple Spider-Man-related characters of note (more on this later). Instead, the Spidey girls have an extended moment learning CPR that feels forever and then tell Cassie, “Wow, you’re a really good teacher” after a rather unimpressive learning session with a motel room pillow. This character just isn’t that interesting even with her new psychic vision powers.
The Spidey girls are also rather uninteresting and given one note of characterization. One of them likes science. One of them has a skateboard and… attitude. One of them is Hispanic. I may have even confused about the characterization, that is how meaningless these characters are. They’re simply a glorified escort mission, a challenge for Cassie to simply keep alive. The scene where they stumble into a brightly lit diner in the middle of nowhere, after Cassie saved their lives and warned them to lay low for their own self-preservation, is immensely irritating. They take it upon themselves to stand on a table of letter jacket-wearing jocks and dance because that’s laying low. They’re annoying characters that never convince you why Cassie should go through such valiant efforts to keep alive. The flashes of them in Spider costumes are only brief glimpses of a possible future, one I can guarantee we’ll never see coming to fruition in this discarded universe.
The strained efforts to transform Madame Web into a disjointed Spider-Man prequel are distracting and generally annoying. It also reveals the doubts the studio had that anyone would be interested in a Madame Web story without additional connections to Peter Parker. Why do we need to have a pregnant Mary Parker (Emma Roberts) in this movie? Why does the climax also involve her giving birth? Are audiences going to wonder whether or not Peter Parker might be born? There’s also the prominent role of Uncle Ben Parker (Adam Scott) as Cassie’s EMT partner. He’s practically the third-leading character. The movie makes several ham-handed meta references about his eventual role in crafting Spider-Man’s development (I also guess he gets to marry Marissa Tomei, so good for you). “Ben can’t wait to be an uncle,” one person says, with, “All of the fun and none of the responsibility.” They might as well just turn to the camera and point-blankly state, “This man will eventually die and inspire Peter Parker to be a hero.” The worst moment of all this forced connectivity is when Mary demurs on picking a name and says she’ll determine when he’s born, even though the film has a “guess the name” baby shower game. Does this mean she saw her newborn babe and the first thing she thought was… Peter? The entire Spider-Man lineage feels so tacked-on and superfluous as glorified Easter eggs.
I’m generally agnostic when it comes to product placement in movies. People got to eat and drink and drive cars, and as long as it’s not obnoxious, then so be it. However, the product placement needs to be mentioned in Madame Web for its narrative prominence, and this leads to some spoiler discussion but I’d advise you read anyway, dear reader, because this movie is practically spoiler-proof by its very conception. Ezekiel Sims is battling Cass and the Spider girls atop a large warehouse with a giant Pepsi sign built onto scaffolding. Then the engineer of Ezekiel’s doom is none other than the falling “S” from Pepsi. That’s right, the villain is dispatched through the help of Pepsi, as well as a literal sign falling from above (cue: eye-roll). Without the assistance from Pepsi (or “Pep_I”), these women might not have lived. You can’t expect that kind of divine intervention from any other cola company. Coke was probably secretly working with the villain, giving him aid and comfort from being parched (begun these Cola Wars have). Deus ex Pepsi. It’s just so egregious and in-your-face that I laughed out loud. Is it also a reference to the original Final Destination ending or am I myself reading the signs too closely?
For those hoping for a so-bad-it’s-good entertainment factor, I found Madame Web to be more dreary, bland, and confusing than unintentionally hilarious. Johnson is an actress I’ve grown to enjoy in efforts like Cha Cha Real Smooth and The Peanut Butter Falcon, also the much-derided but still enjoyable Netflix Persuasion, but she sleepwalks through this movie. I don’t blame her. I don’t blame any of the actors (poor Rahim’s performance seems entirely replaced by bad ADR lines). The character’s nonchalance already zaps the low stakes of a movie where a psychic character we don’t really have fond feelings over is trying to save a trio of annoying teenagers before a vague hodgepodge of a villain succeeds in killing them before they can kill him, which means they all need to kill him before he can kill them before they are destined to kill him. No wonder the executives decided to crassly cram in some Spider-Man relatives to make people care. Madame Web is less a bad movie and more a poorly executed and confused movie, one that doesn’t understand the desires of its intended audience. It’s barely even a superhero action movie, with few scenes of elevated action, though the director enjoys her ceiling perspective flips. There’s a moment where our villain flat-out says, “You can’t do [a thing],” and literally seconds later, through no setup or explanation, suddenly Cassie can do [that thing]. The whole movie feels like this moment, arbitrary and contrived and desperately reaching for an identity of its own. It should have stayed in the Amazon researching spiders before it was destined to die.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Night Swim (2024)
It feels like the genesis of Night Swim was somebody saying, “We need a new way to do a haunted house movie so… what if…?” and then just pointed to different parts of the home and questioned whether it could be haunted. What I’m saying is we were probably a coin flip away from a terrifying tale of a haunted barbecue grill (working title: Dead Meat). A haunted pool would naturally lead to the question, “Well, why don’t you stay out of the pool?” and, well, we don’t really have an answer, so the pool can’t do too much because it’s immobile. There’s a possibility here with some spirit linked to the pool water seeking sacrifices and offering rewards in return, but this is downplayed so much and eventually forgotten during the muddied reasoning that concludes this confusing movie. I don’t think the film can even stick to its own rules. It needs to be either goofier, fully embracing its ridiculous premise of a haunted swimming pool, or going even darker and deeper with its back-story and rules and how this corrupts the new family, not because of some evil possession but from the simple wish-granting opportunity of feeding this monster for personal gain. There’s a way to make this concept work, specifically bringing the revelation earlier and dealing with the devil’s bargain implications and moral relativism. Alas, instead we get a movie about a husband being possessed by evil spring spirits and literally playing a game of Marco Polo with his children and, upon stalking them, pounces by ominously shouting, “You’re supposed to say ‘Polo’!” Just keep swimming, folks.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Argylle (2024)
Knocked around by critics and tagged as the latest excuse for the Death of Filmmaking thanks to its overwhelming budget and general ironic indifference, Argylle is a goofy spy comedy that, while lesser, is an easy watch and would earn regular rotation as a TNT afternoon giant. It’s not trying to be more than a good time, and while its quippy attitude can feel forced and approaching irony overload, it’s also the kind of movie that entertains as breezy escapism. It’s fun. Enough.
Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) is a best-selling spy novelist with a dashing super spy Lothario lead character by the name of Argylle (Henry Cavill in the worst haircut of his career). She’s journeying with her pet cat, her closest relationship, when she’s stopped on a train by Aidan Wilde (Sam Rockwell). He tells her that he’s a real spy and that everything she’s written in her five novels has come true, and different covert agencies are taking notice. She’s got teams of assassins and spies coming for her, while Aidan tries his best to protect her and get her to remember key details that could save the world from nefarious forces.
Argylle is too breezy and too predictable by half. It’s a spy thriller that I’m positive many will be able to predict the big twists miles before they occur. Why do all these spies want Elly Conway, and how could she know about the intricate world of international spy craft? The answer is exactly what you’d expect, if you’ve watched more than your share of twist-laden thrillers. Thankfully, director Matthew Vaughn (Kingsman, X-Men: First Class) and company dispatch with this central twist after an hour, providing more time to deal with the aftermath and build off of its story impact. Ah, dear reader, but there’s going to be another twist once you know the first, and again, if you can predict the first, you’re likely to predict the second, because stories about universally good people are often dull, and movies have provided a new medical maxim that characters use maladies to re-evaluate their prior life and choose to be better (oh how nimbly I’m dancing around these spoilers). What makes these predictions forgivable is that the movie seems to know you will anticipate them and has more to offer.
That’s because in this silly universe, very little seems to matter besides getting to the next scene. It’s not a satirical send-up of the genre like Vaughn’s Kingsman movies. Instead, it’s more of a generic distillation of spy thrillers, complete with bad guys walking through mission control banks of computers and barking impotent orders. The only added cleverness that sets the Argylle world apart is Elly’s writing, the fictional version of this far more bland spy universe. In the book parts, Vaughn takes note to raise the style as well as the tongue-in-cheek comedy. It’s supposed to be tone-deaf and dumb and ridiculous, because it’s the big screen version of bad genre writing. You can have fun with that, with characters so serious to the point of parody, with nonsensical technology and near escapes. But when you try to do the same thing in the so-called real world, then the movie starts to eradicate any sense of a baseline for credulity. I did like the practical advice of Aidan on how to crush the skulls of your downed enemy (“Just imagine you’re dancing The Twist.. twist and smash”). By the end of Argylle, Elly and Aidan can do just about anything because they’re practically superheroes. The entertainment of the fish-out-of-water aspect of Elly’s story is short-lived and unfulfilled because the movie becomes more of a tale of automatic self-actualization rather than growth.
The direction feels rather drab at points, and many locations and scenes have a general sense of missing… something. Just watch any set and it appears so drastically empty that I questioned whether they cut back on the set dressers and props. Empty dance clubs. Empty streets. Empty hallways. Everything is too pristine, too sleek, and too empty and green screened (might be a result of COVID filmmaking). This carries over into the disappointing visual aesthetic, as Vaughn’s signature style feels dampened by the pesky CGI additions of many sequences, adding to the unreality rather than building out this minimalist world. If there had been an extra EXTRA twist that everything was also a story-within-a-spy-story, I would not have been that shocked, and it honestly would have explained the underwritten and underwhelming world of clandestine spy-making.
Vaughn errs in the core creative decision of having his main character mix reality and fantasy, not through the idea itself, which could be ripe, but through its confusing execution and editing. Having Elly hallucinate Agent Argylle in place of a real secret agent is fine, as we can contrast from her idealized version of a super spy, her James Bond, versus the actual grunts struggling to win the day. There are a couple problems with this execution though and firstly that the “reality” isn’t that far removed from the fantasy. This is still a world where Rockwell’s spy is able to commit amazing acts of dexterity and martial arts and balletic violence flying around rooms, but I guess he falls down more. The difference isn’t that fantastic when it’s already a hyper-stylized action world. The bigger issue is just how confusing it all plays out visually because we’re seeing Elly’s perspective and in rapid blinks Cavill will turn into Rockwell and vice versa. It makes for a jarring sequence that doesn’t fully capitalize on the comic potential while keeping the audience distant from fully engaging with the sheer simple pleasures of watching a fun fight. This happens throughout the first half of the movie and severely hampers the action scenes from being accessible. I think we needed a longer duration for this to work. We see Elly’s version for a period of time, and then we cut to the real world where Aidan is bouncing into walls, falling down, and flailing. By continuously jumping back and forth, not just in the scenes but in the same shots, Vaughn has made his movie harder to watch and harder to comprehend, and with a loud soundtrack blaring.
There is one sequence of great filmmaking for Vaughn, but to explain such will require some spoilers, so beware, dear reader. There are three instances of the whirly-bird dance where a woman is lifted spread-eagle atop a man’s shoulders who then spins her around. The first time, it’s Agent Argylle and Legrange, played by Dua Lipa (Barbie) dripping with sexual energy. The second time is when Elly and Aidan are on a mission and he lifts her up, to her amusement and flirtation. She’s living out her fantasy version, with Rockwell standing in for Cavill and Howard standing in for Dua Lipa. We’ve gone from these stunningly attractive human specimens to people who look more ordinary, including a fuller figured woman engaging in the same sexy shenanigans as the conventional blonde bombshell. She can be her dream version of herself. Finally, the third occurrence happens during a climactic showdown where Elly and Aidan team up against an onslaught of faceless armed henchmen. With the aid of colorful smoke canisters, their offensive surge plays out like a couples’ dance routine, including holding one another for high kicks to incendiary devices. It’s all set to Leona Lewis’ cover of Snow Patrol’s “Run,” and as the music swells, it’s easy to get swept up too. Even the gunshots are set to the beats of the song, culminating in the final whirly-bird dance, except it’s not Elly being lifted, this time it’s Aidan. See, she’s not the Bond girl bombshell, she’s James Bond. It’s a silly moment but with the added setup, thematic underpinnings, and Vaughn’s virtuoso stylistic seizing of the moment, it plays out as empowerment and an expression of love. For real.
I can understand being generally disappointed with Argylle. It looks and feels like it’s been built on the parts of other better spy franchises and desperately lacks the charisma and personality of Vaughn’s Kingsman movies, themselves giddy and perverse satires. I wasn’t the biggest fan of 2017’s The Golden Circle sequel, but it’s got oodles of style to spare compared with Argylle. I wish Vaughn would push himself beyond the orbit of making cheeky, winky spy action comedies, the same genre he’s been playing in since 2015 and now for four movies. While the original Kingsman was a breath of fresh air with fun characters, a snarky attitude, and slick style, Argylle is all snark and minimal style. There’s so much comedy that feels like it should be funnier, from the travails of Elly’s CGI-enchanced cat to the floundering hand-to-hand combat. When recognizable names start showing up playing forgettable genre stock types, and then they start dabbling in accents as other genre stock types, it feels like the whole exercise is a miss. However, the central buddy relationship between Rockwell and Howard is where the movie works, and fortunately that’s the element that has the most foundational effort. This is a movie that, in the future, if it was on TV during a lazy day, you’d sit down and watch the rest and mostly be happy about it. Argylle isn’t anything new or fresh but it’s buoyed by its stars, and not the magazine cover models but its real stars, Rockwell and Howard. In their hands, even lesser spy comedies can still be fairly worthwhile escapist entertainment. Still, I must deduct some points for the movie missing a perfectly setup opportunity to have Henry Cavill and John Cena kiss onscreen at the end. It was right there, folks, and we all deserved it.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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