Madame Web is bad and you should absolutely go see it
Fine, I’ll be the one to say it. You should go see Madame Web.
Don’t get confused; it’s a terrible movie. But it’s so bad you really have to take it all in for yourself. The script is a mess, the delivery is awkward, the villain is comically bad and there are several laugh-out-loud moments.
I couldn’t recommend it more.
Madame Web follows Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson) through what amounts to a very bad, no good, awful couple of days (or weeks? It’s a bit unclear as she takes a quick jaunt to Peru at one point). Who is Cassie Webb, you ask? Great question. She’s the paramedic partner of Ben Parker (Adam Scott).
Yes, that Ben Parker. The uncle of Peter Parker, future Spider-Man. And boy do they ever want to say the words Peter and Parker together. The scenes of heavy implication around both Aunt May and our future web-slinger are utterly hilarious.
The long and short of the movie is that Cassie, whose mother died while researching spiders in the Amazon, has an incident at work where she goes into the water with a car and is technically dead for a few minutes before Parker resuscitates her.
Webb starts having these weird déja vu experiences where she seems to be re-living moments of her life. Turns out, Web can see the future, and this leads to her crossing paths with a trio of teen girls — Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Mattie (Celeste O’Connor) and Anya (Isabela Merced) — who are being hunted by a strange man.
This man, Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), umm, has powers (?) from the same type of spider that Cassie’s mother was searching for in the Amazon. It’s honestly not super clear what all those powers are or how he got them as his abilities are wildly inconsistent. We do know that he
- killed Cassie’s mom and
- thinks that the trio of teens will hunt him in the future and
- never wears shoes.
Rahim is all over the place in this movie. The audio during his delivery is bad, the lines don’t match up with the movements of his mouth and there’s discussion around whether his entire performance was re-done with ADR after filming.
Very little in Madame Web makes sense. The plot is messy. The trio of Spider-Girls only wear their actually cool suits for about a minute in the movie, and that’s in a dream sequence. The editing is sloppy. The script is hilariously bad.
But I’ll be honest with you, I enjoyed Johnson’s performance. She’s dry and blasé through most of it, but it works. The reveal of Cassie’s clairvoyance is extremely well done. Adam Scott is delightful. While I would prefer none of these movies become canon in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I would also love it if Tom Holland and Johnson share the screen at some point.
Where Morbius, one of Sony Pictures’ other Spider-Man adjacent movies, was boring and a slog, at least Madame Web was so bad it’s good. Going to the theater is supposed to be entertaining, and I certainly was entertained.
Movie: Madame Web
Release Date: February 14
Director: S.J. Clarkson
Stars: Dakota Johnson, Adam Scott, Tahar Rahim, Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O’Connor, Isabela Merced
Rating: 1 out of 5 stars