The season of love is in the air once more, but a different anniversary is joining it this year: it’s been one year to the day since Madame Web‘s web dared to connect us all, often in spite of itself. In the last 12 months I have found myself embracing the camp period movie vibe that Madame Web managed to find amid a sea of clear production issues, making it a comfort watch I’d happily settle with over many of its contemporaries in the waning cycle of the superhero oeuvre. So to celebrate that love, on this most loving of days, I just want to talk about the thing that Madame Web itself loves most.
Cars. Stealing cars. And then hitting people with those cars. Well, mostly one specific person who does deserve to be hit with a car multiple times over the cause of Madame Web.
I do not know what inspired the creatives of Madame Web to make motor vehicles a key thematic element in a 2003-period comic book movie about a Spider-Man adjacent character who’s defining traits in the comics were being old, blind, and precognitive. But whoever did, they went all in: from the very moment it begins, Madame Web is essentially a movie about cars, stolen or otherwise, being crashed into people. One of the first things we see Cassie Web do is nearly hit Mattie Franklin with her ambulance, although it’s the rare moment of near-vehicular manslaughter in the movie that is done without intent. Her powers emerge at the site of a car accident, her first attempt to save someone with those abilities results in them dying from another.
And that’s even before she starts stealing them. The closest thing to a hero Madame Web really has is the New York Taxicab she swipes to escort her sudden young wards to safety from the wroth of Ezekiel Sims, becoming something of a Chekov’s Stolen Vehicle for the rest of the film, especially after she uses it to smash into Sims at a diner. It all comes together in the final act in perhaps the closest thing Madame Web really gives itself as a traditional superhero moment: a synthesis of stolen car and vehicle-based aggression when, moments before he’s about to kill three future spider-kids, Cassie manages to plunge an ambulance (that she stole) through a Calvin Klein ad and clean into Sims. The symbolism at play here: it’s an ambulance, Cassie’s transport of choice in her day job as an EMT. It’s a vehicle she steals, because… well, that’s just because something Madame Web decided to make her do earlier. And it’s her second time smashing a vehicle into Sims in the movie, like the vehicular equivalent of the hero perfecting their ultimate attack after a failed first attempt. But the attack is just “car”.
What makes Madame Web‘s love of stolen-cars-as-projectile-weapons as endearing as it is absurd is that it is an acquiescence to two things. The first, is that Madame Web is a superhero movie about a character who’s powers are mental, rather than physical, but not even in a telekinetic way: Cassie can simply get visions of potential futures, it’s not like she can fling rocks with her mind or has supernatural strength and agility. Madame Web, try as it might, wants to be a film that plays into that, but it means it has to replace traditional fight scenes with something more grounded in what we could expect a normal human being could do, especially against an antagonist who does have heightened physical abilities. The ability to drive a car into someone else is, perhaps, a totally bizarre grounding point to go for, but it is a grounding point nonetheless.
The second ties into that, and the key to Madame Web‘s real charm in spite of its wildly vacillating levels of quality. At its most earnest, Madame Web is a love letter to where superhero movies were at in 2003, for better or worse. It’s the era where capturing superheroic action on the screen, either technologically or through sheer belief in what an audience would and would not suspend belief for, that created a whole cottage industry in the early-aughts comic book movie boom of similar films. For every X-Men and Spider-Man that managed to propel the genre to not just heights, but feasibility full stop, you got your Daredevils and your Catwomans, films that Madame Web are much more in-line with than what the genre is in the 2020s. This is a film that, in both success and failure, plays within the limitations comic book movies imposed on themselves in the early 2000s–that hesitance to really embrace the extent of the source material, that desire to couch anything that could be perceived as superhuman in the reality of the time, to convince audiences, but convince them slowly, that you could make good movies about cape comics. It’s that kind of thinking that leads you to putting out a superhero movie where the main character’s true superpower is the ability to locate a car, steal it, and then plow it into someone else.
Madame Web may not have entirely emulated the “good movie” part of that formula for everyone, absolutely. But it does make me laugh every time it becomes a movie about cars more than it does a movie about the Spider-Verse, or superheroes at large. A year after its release–and in the shadows of another big superhero release that struggles to escape the fatigue and malaise of a genre in seeming decline once more–I’ll always love that.
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