The time has finally come. After Sony’s last attempt at making a Spider-Man movie without the titular character, Morbius, the studio is back and better than ever with 2024’s Madame Web.
This review will contain spoilers for SJ Clarkson’s Madame Web.
A film so mind boggling I genuinely questioned if I was watching a fever dream unfold upon an IMAX screen. As it turns out, everything my eyes witnessed during the 116-minute runtime was very much real. Madame Web is set in New York City circa 2003 and follows the life of paramedic Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson) who can see the future after an unfortunate drowning accident. Eventually, Cassie discovers a man, Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), linked to her past is going to kill three teenage girls who will become spider-women in the future. Ezekiel Sims has nightmares of the three spider-women killing him in the future and plots to kill them before they’re superheroes. Which, when you think about it, this plot point makes little to no sense. One of Spider-Man’s morals, like the popular DC hero Batman, is never killing anybody, so the fact that these three willingly murder somebody in the future is incredibly confusing but some may give them the benefit of the doubt since these characters technically aren’t Spider-Man, they just dress similar to him!
Dakota Johnson, gives without a doubt one of the funniest performances I have ever seen in a film. Although Johnson is not a stranger to poorly received films, having starred in the Fifty Shades trilogy, she clearly thought she was signing up to be in the Marvel Studios produced Marvel Cinematic Universe, rather than its Sony helmed counterpart, so I can only imagine the whiplash she felt during her first read of this abomination of a screenplay.
Rounding out the cast of characters we follow are: Sydney Sweeney as Julia Cornwall, a “nerdy” girl who looks like a comic book fan’s idea of what a nerdy stereotype should look like. With knee-high socks and a scene of her dancing on a table with her shirt tied up, we all know what their disgusting objective was in sexualizing characters that are supposed to be teenagers, capitalizing on her infamous appearances in Euphoria.
It’s also interesting that Sweeney’s character announces she knows Tae Kwon-Do, a skill she does not put to use despite being in very real danger for the vast majority of the film’s runtime, a fact that made it hard to keep my laughter in. The other two Spider-Women, Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced) and Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor) practically have no personality at all.
As of writing this, it’s been a week since I saw the film and I cannot tell you anything more about their characters besides the fact that Isabela Merced is a hard worker and Celeste O’Connor’s character is insufferable.
Moving onto the antagonist of the film, Tahar Rahim’s performance as Ezekiel Sims might be the worst acting I’ve ever seen in a movie. Either the audio got compromised during production, or they didn’t record dialogue while filming, because over half of his dialogue doesn’t match his mouth. His character gets practically no setup in the film besides the opening three minutes.
Rahim rambles on and on about “everything he has ever built” yet we have zero clue what he has done in between the 30-year time jump after the prologue of the movie. He gets a hold of security technology and that’s it. Then, last but not least, we have Adam Scott and Emma Roberts as Uncle Ben Parker and Mary Parker to attach this incomprehensible film to the Spider-Man franchise as a last-ditch effort to garner attention.
I genuinely feel so bad for SJ Clarkson, as she has directed some great episodes of television before and clearly has a love of film. The one episode she directed for Succession, “Prague”, was beautiful. So, it only leads to the question… What could have happened during the production process to lead us to this point? If I was anybody who worked on this film I would be downright embarrassed, as it barely even comes across as a superhero movie. Instead, it comes across as a mid-2000s team-up movie where everyone earns their costumes, but they don’t even earn them! This film has the “heroes” in their costumes for 45 seconds maximum and they’re only shown in dream sequences.
As Johnson has stated in her hilarious press tour for this film, it went through “drastic” rewrites. It shows as most sequences make no logistical sense, like one for example, where Cassie Webb is a wanted fugitive and gets on a plane to Peru, leaving all three teenage girls to fend for themselves under the care of Ben Parker, while Ezekiel Sims stalks them like prey. Funnily enough, that’s not the most ridiculous thing to happen in the movie. If you told me a Pepsi sign would play a really big part in the third act I would’ve called you a liar. Sadly, that’s not the case as it is such egregious product placement that I cannot help but laugh out loud thinking about it.
I’d like to mention that while the film takes place in New York City, (one of the three biggest cities in the country) the city gets treated like a middle school as our four main protagonists have numerous random encounters with each other in the first act. I can’t be surprised by this since the movie is written by Morbius scribes Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless. This script is arguably worse than its predecessor as a “superhero” film since these characters do nothing heroic, fight anybody, or get into costumes.
All they do is run from Sims and give Dakota Johnson CPR filmed in a smutty way. The film is shot and edited so poorly that I could barely tell what was happening during the third-act climax. I’ve talked to some friends who have also seen the movie, and they were just as confused as I was. This is yet another testament to big studios churning out what many consider garbage.
Despite all of this, I’m glad this movie exists. I had a blast watching it and I can confidently say it’s more entertaining than most of what Marvel Studios has put out in the past 5 years. I will definitely be buying the 4K Blu-Ray of this movie, as it’s so bad, it’s good.
Madame Web stars Dakota Johnson as Cassandra Web, Sydney Sweeney as Julia Cornwall, Isabela Merced as Anya Corazon, Celeste O’Connor as Mattie Franklin, Tahar Rahim as Ezekil Sims, Adam Scott as Ben Parker and Emma Roberts as Mary Parker. The film is now showing in theatres, please watch the film and form your own opinion.
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