Madame Web - Film Review

With the exception of The Batman, I haven't watched a superhero movie since Thanos snapped half the Marvel universe away (I felt it was a good place to leave things). To me, the superhero genre has long-since grown stale and formulaic to the point of where I'd rather try my luck with indie films than see what the Guardians of the Galaxy are doing now. I always assumed it would be some cool new IP or stylish innovation that might eventually bring me back into the nerd-fold, but instead it was morbid curiosity.

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Where You Can Find It: Available for rent/purchase on most on-demand streaming services to include Amazon Video, Apple TV, and YouTube.

General Information
Madame Web is a superhero action film released on 14 February 2024. It was directed by S.J. Clarkson. Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, Claire Parker, S.J. Clarkson, and Kerem Sanga all contributed to the screenplay/story. Cinematography was directed by Mauro Fiore and music was provided by Johan Söderqvist. Leigh Folsom Boyd was responsible for editing this film, and Ngila Dickson oversaw costume design. The intellectual property is based off of Marvel's Spider-Man comic book series, although the character of Madame Web has never had her own comic book series. It's unclear if this film is set in the same cinematic universe as Sony's Spider-Man films or Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe. Some of this lack of clarity is likely due to its abysmal performance in theaters. As of 27 March 2024, Madame Web has brought in around $99 million at the global box office against a budget ranging from between $80-$100 million (likely not including advertising). Critically, it sports a bruising 26 Metascore on Metacritic and an excruciating 12% Tomatometer rating on Rotten Tomatoes. All-around, Madame Web can boast one achievement though as it is one of the biggest box office bombs in the superhero film genre in the past ten years!

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What the original Madame Web looked like. Imagine Dakota Johnson in this get-up...

Poor performance can be enough to sink a bad movie at the box office, but this particular movie also had the misfortune to get bad press before most viewers even saw it thanks to one of its leading ladies. In mid-January, lead actress, Dakota Johnson gave an interview to Entertainment Weekly and spoke on the film and hinted at trouble as it neared its release. Among her statements were complaints about the excessive use of blue screen and that "I don’t know if this is going to be good at all! I hope that I did an okay job!" Another actress, Sydney Sweeney, joined in on the fun after it released when she made some lighthearted jabs at its poor reception while guest hosting on Saturday Night Live.

The Story
Cassandra "Cassie" Webb (played by Dakota Johnson) is an EMT worker with the New York City Fire Department that gains the powers of precognition when she suffers head trauma while attempting a dangerous rescue. These new-found powers warn her about the villainous Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), who sometimes also has the ability to see into the future, and his plans to murder three teenage girls. Cassie's quest to stop him will force her to dig into her own past as an orphan and discover why her mom "...was researching spiders right before she died."

 

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Cassie needs to protect these three teenager from an exceptionally cranky Spider-Man knockoff

The silver lining about films like Madame Web is that they teach valuable lessons about what not to do when it comes to storytelling and why having too many cooks in the kitchen can be lethal. There's a cluster of different, conflicting ideas floating around in this film that hint at what could have been. In a few precognition scenes, we get a chilling presentation of Sims hunting down these girls and brutally dispatching them with ease in a very Terminator kind of style, but these moments are quickly deflated with how casually Sims is thwarted later on. At one point we get an almost Breakfast Club-like moment where the three teenagers are stuck in a forest alone and talk about their differences, but it's never truly explored as they are never given enough screen-time to actually develop or matter. Lastly, we're presented with an absurd Peter Parker origin story, however it's a teaser (at best) to remind viewers that Sony still owns the rights to the Spider-Man IP. Everything is half-baked and poorly executed to the point of where I'm astounded Sony let production even begin on this project in the first place.

Additional controversy that initially portended to this movie's future failure was when it released it's trailer. Although the infamous line Dakota Johnson utters in that trailer has been cut from the final film, Madame Web is chock-full of poor dialogue and awful characterization. Cassie seemingly lives to spout stilted exposition, while Sims is completely unexplored and seemingly does evil things purely because he keeps having nightmares about three spider-women kicking his butt. The three teenagers Cassie is charged with protecting have one-note personalities and are far too eager to cooperate with a strange woman they just met in the NYC subway. To briefly hearken back to Terminator again, one of the things that made Sarah Conner so interesting in the original film was her relatability. Even after encountering the T-800, she refuses to trust Kyle Reese until all other options had been exhausted and he'd proven himself. Unfortunately, Cassie has the personality of a T-800, and by the end I never cared whether Sims succeeded or not.

 

The most aggravating bit about this film has to be over how it implements Cassie's precognition powers. Essentially, S.J. Clarkson thought it would be a good use of time to just force the viewers to watch the same scenes over and over again so we could also see into the future like Cassie. First of all, Cassie's powers seem to only function when the plot demands it, and the redundant requirement of re-watching scenes repeatedly is grating at best, and insulting at worst as it feels like padding. In total, I would estimate around 10-15 minutes of this movie is Cassie either looking into the future or the past. The entire opening scene could have been cut from this film since it's later re-shown to us. Other films like Minority Report and Edge of Tomorrow presented us with great ways to tell a story involving precognition without being boring, so it can be done, but it seems like Madame Web put little to no thought in their approach to the material.

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Let's not...

 

Special Effects/Atmosphere

I usually don't mention costume design in my General Information section, but Ngila Dickson get special recognition as Madame Web's outfits are hilariously bad. To some extent, I understand that comic book outfits generally don't translate well to the real world, but there has to be some balance between faithfully adapting to the comics and looking like bad cosplay. I'm not sure why Sims has an evil Spider-Man suit, but it looks like Sony repurposed the Venom suit from Spider-Man 3 and just painted over it in a few areas. The spider-women outfits are also cheap-looking, and makes Madame Web look like a prequel to some CW show. Even some of the civilian outfits look ridiculous. Sydney Sweeney's Julia is supposed to be a well-meaning poindexter, but her school outfit is highly suggestive as her skirt hides very little and is poorly fitted (I won't complain too much on this). The cherry on the cake is Cassie's Madame Web outfit in the finale that looks like something out of Power Rangers. If Anna B. Sheppard was able to make Captain America look cool, there has to be a way to make spider-women not look like clowns.

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Guaranteed to strike fear in the hearts of NYC's criminals

In a lot of ways, Madame Web reminds me of the superhero films of the early 2000s as some of them also struggled with awful writing and ugly outfits. Another aspect that it's similar to them in is in its special effects. Madame Web looks like it got its CGI from the early 2000s, and Dakota Johnson wasn't lying about the excessive use of blue/green screen. Nearly everything looks artificial when it comes to set design, and climactic set-piece at the warehouse was wholly underwhelming. The opening shot of Dakota Johnson pretending to drive an ambulance really set the tone for what to expect for the rest of the film and should serve as a warning of what to expect later on.

The Acting 

I've seen Dakota Johnson in both good and (really) bad films so I know she has talent. With that said however, she gives one of the most soulless performances I've seen in some time from any performer. Every line was delivered with the least amount of effort possible, which at first made me think that Cassie is supposed to be jaded, but when I saw her bored expression as she weaved through NYC traffic in an ambulance I saw all I needed to. Even in the climax, there's an aura of "let's just get through this" that permeates every scene she's in. Somehow - and I can't believe I'm saying this - her performance in 50 Shades of Grey was more heartfelt than in this.

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Dakota Johnson makes her best attempt to make her performance in 50 Shades of Grey look good by contrast to this film

I've never seen Tahar Rahim in a film before, and this movie doesn't interest me in a repeat performance. If Ezekiel Sims is supposed to be intimidating and imposing, Rahim failed on all fronts to pull this off. Maybe some of this is due to his strange accent that sounds like a Frenchman trying to sound Hispanic, but he unintentionally comes off as a nerd that wishes he was scarier than he actually is. He doesn't get much of a chance to interact with others, so there's little range for him to work with, but I don't know if we missed out on too much by relegating him to a few phone calls and keeping him behind a dark Spider-Man mask.

If I had to say something positive, I'd note that the actresses who played the three teenagers Cassie is supposed to protect made attempts to act, but the fight was a losing battle considering the circumstances. I haven't seen Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, or Celeste O'Connor before, but I can see they each try as there's some level of emotion and charisma in their delivery. Personally, I think all three of them look too old for their respective roles, but that's more of a casting problem than an acting issue. It looks like they're all going on to do bigger and better projects, so I hope these three land on their feet and look forward to seeing them work with better material.

The Best of the Best: Trying to deduce the origin of Ezekial Sims' accent.

The Worst of the Worst: Seeing the same boring scenes again and again because Cassie is still trying to figure out how precognition works.

Calhooey Score: 2/10 - Awful

Would I Recommend?

7

Too bad, I'm going to tell you anyway

I went into this with the hope that Madame Web would be so bad it's good, but it didn't even succeed at that. Watching this felt like a waste of time, and I'm not even sure who this was originally for. I don't know of any comic book fans that were hankering for a Madame Web movie, and if you like Spider-Man, you won't find him here. If you want something similar that's so bad it's good, I'd recommend Catwoman or 50 Shades of Grey as those are both hilarious. This isn't worth your time or your money. If you're stuck on an airplane and this is the only movie to watch while the time goes by, you're better off staring out the window.

Spoiler Comments

• I thought Uncle Ben was some kind of blue collar guy from Queens? Why does every character in a comic book movie prequel need to have some crazy backstory?
• I miss Blockbuster...
• Why do Ben and Cassie have around 5-6 different orders of Chinese food between the two of them at the firehouse? That is a massive amount of food, and you just know they're not going to eat it all. So wasteful...
  
• I'm still trying to get over the death of that one guy that wouldn't stop pressing the fat out of the hamburgers at that one cookout.
  
• Nothing classier than going full Coyote Ugly at a roadside diner.
  
• I was sick of hearing Britney Spears' "Toxic" in 2004, and I'm still sick of hearing it today.
• Remember: Sims seemingly had all of the powers of the NSA during the heydays of the Patriot Act and seemingly couldn't find any of his targets for the entirety of Cassie's time away in the Amazon.
  
• How did Cassie's mom develop those photos of her trip (found in her journal) in the Amazon when she died before she got the chance? Did Las Arañas have a darkroom just beyond the magical lagoon cave?
  
• I love that the dude from Narcos: Mexico is just hanging out in the Peruvian jungle to give Cassie exposition.
• I guess Las Arañas modernized between the 1970s and 2000s.
• It's been a while since I saw product placement go so hard that it's used as the primary weapon to kill the antagonist with. 
• With that said, I could go for a nice, cold Pepsi right about now...
  

References

(1) Madame Web. (2024). Madame Web cover image. IMDB. Retrieved from: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11057302/.

(2) Miller, D. (2024, February 9). Original Madame Web comic book image. ScreenRant. Retrieved from: https://screenrant.com/madame-web-powers-marvel-comics-history-explained/.

(3) Jensen, K. (2024, February 15). Madame Web and the three teenagers image. Catholic Review. Retrieved from: https://catholicreview.org/movie-review-madame-web/.

(4) SonyPictures. (2023, November 28). Let's try that again gif. Tenor. Retrieved from: https://tenor.com/view/let's-try-that-again-cassandra-webb-madame-web-let's-give-it-another-go-let's-retry-gif-1949590994891204846.

(5) Bone, C. (2024, February 15). Spider-women image. WGTC. Retrieved from: https://wegotthiscovered.com/movies/madame-web-ending-explained-heres-how-it-connects-to-the-spider-man-universe/.

(6) Pinkus, O. (2024, February 21). Dakota Johnson in Madame Web image. Today. Retrieved from: https://www.today.com/popculture/movies/dakota-johnson-madame-web-viral-interviews-rcna139227. 

(7) Madameweb. (2024, February 6). What if I don't want to know gif. Giphy. Retrieved from: https://giphy.com/gifs/madameweb-YVAPiSCzRLSDZOzj0W.