Jonah Naplan   February 16, 2024

“Madame Web” is a comic book movie so awful you have to see it to believe it. Or better yet, don’t. Instead, read this piece of criticism from a real blockbuster fan who’s been rooting for superhero movies to reclaim their quality and popularity in a post-“Spider-Man: No Way Home” world for a while now, but has walked away disappointed time and time again because it doesn’t seem like that issue will be resolved any time soon. “Madame Web” is certainly the single most baffling product of those efforts—one that serves virtually zero purpose whatsoever, and fails at most things that even a merely forgettable superhero film gets right. Especially having witnessed writers going on a long strike this past summer, fighting for the liberty to stay planted in the creative world instead of being replaced by robots, “Madame Web” feels particularly depressing, as though it were only created by some sort of industry conveyor belt or an A.I. content-generating machine making generic, watered-down, soulless “cinema,” rather than actual writers with real ideas and a care for their audience. And yes, it’s worse than “Morbius.”

It takes place in 2003, in a post-9/11 and supposedly pre-Peter Parker New York City. Cassandra “Cassie” Webb (Dakota Johnson) is a paramedic who triggers her own little Spidey-sense after falling into the Hudson River during a rescue mission gone awry with her partner Ben (Adam Scott). Decades earlier, her very pregnant mother (Kerry Bishé) was studying spiders in the Peruvian Amazon with her colleague Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), who went bananas and started murdering everybody. Cassie’s mother passed away in childbirth but Cassie survived, aided by a mystical rainforest arachnid that not only saved her life but granted her magical abilities like the power to foresee events that haven’t happened yet. This particular maxim is illustrated through near constant flashforward fragments that are woefully dizzying but don’t actually add much to the narrative complex. Of course, no one bothers to listen to her, and either shrugs her off as mentally insane or prescribes quack medicine; the eye doctor suggests that Cassie should go home to rest and watch old movies (huh?).

This is one of umpteen lines of dialogue in “Madame Web” that stick out like a sore thumb and make you wonder why they’re there and where they came from and how. By one point or another, you realize the script is sort of just like that, constantly making you question the origin, meaning, and purpose of a joke, while it instead earns unintentional laughter from things that are meant to be played as serious or emotionally devastating, but certainly never comedic. Some scenes feel like a “Saturday Night Live” parody of a superhero movie or even an imitation of a comic book film in all its melodrama and deadpan delivery, but never an actual comic book movie with stakes and scope and characters with thoughts and feelings. “Madame Web” acts as only a pathetic placeholder for a superhero movie that spends its entire runtime trying to be a real one.

Directed by S.J. Clarkson—who spent a long career on television prior to working on this movie—and co-written by her, Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, and Claire Parker, “Madame Web” continues to stumble through its footing as it introduces three teenage girls to the story—Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Anya (Isabela Merced), and Mattie (Celeste O’Connor)—all of whom are being hunted by the modern-day Ezekiel, who, having somehow gained his own clairvoyant abilities, knows that they’ll grow up to kill him, so he intends to squelch the trio first. Cassie becomes a sort of mother to the girls as she escorts them around Queens, never reacting to danger in a way that’d be realistic given these circumstances, and the three girls even less so act like actual teens (part of it may be because two out of three of them were born in the late 90s and stopped being teens a little while ago). There’s a weak dynamic in the group, which automatically renders them difficult to root for and care about as they venture into dangerous and uncertain territory.

It’s not that any of the young actresses are bad, it’s that they’re some of the worst written female characters I’ve ever seen in a comic book movie, often painted as desperate, or clingy, or impertinent. You could argue that a good actor would rise to the occasion and conjure something memorable anyway, but that’s particularly hard to do here, especially when studio mandates and strict franchise expectations keep pressing and wringing the ensemble into a proverbial box that inhibits their ability to soar. Dakota Johnson gets the closest to achieving some level of cult classic-y greatness here, demonstrating that she’s one of the only people onboard who has a thorough understanding of the kind of movie she’s acting in. But her efforts are fruitfully canceled out by a film that never allows itself the liberty to turn into something so bad that it becomes good again. Each time the movie threatens to evolve into something more, it gets bogged down twice as much by some sort of unspoken checklist or big battle that shortchanges emotional stakes for reasons of maximum, unbridled destruction.

There’s a great trash comedy hidden somewhere within the masses of “Madame Web” but either the filmmakers are too scared to bring it out or they’re simply not allowed to. When they do try to share some glimmer of inspiration or fun it feels out of place and inconsistent in tone. If you’re going to make a big swing and hit the ball hard, go for it. “Madame Web,” however, wimps out in the same way that a lot of bad comic book movies wimp out by staying so self-serious that it turns intractable.

Most disappointing of all, “Madame Web” doesn’t even capture the essence of the early 2000s correctly, only defining the year 2003 by Beyoncé and flip phones. It’s rather fitting because “Madame Web” often sounds and feels like a comic book movie that was made that same year or earlier, and not even by a major studio. It just looks cheap. Sure, the screenplay is incredibly dated, but even worse is the CGI which is utterly inexcusable for a budget of $80 million. Tahar Rahim, who probably turns in the worst performance of the entire cast, sometimes doesn’t even have his dialogue properly synced up with his mouth movements, which is like an underdeveloped video game cutscene or a Zoom meeting with poor internet connection. All of his lines sound like they were recorded completely separate from everyone else’s in a different room with poor audio quality and a lack of noise canceling equipment. The best we can possibly do as audience members is wonder how, what with the armies of corporate hands over at Sony and Columbia, this sketchy, unfinished dumpster fire got released as the final product.

I know plenty of Marvel fans who are not planning on going out to see “Madame Web,” and I’d encourage you to do the same if you’re having similar second thoughts. It’s our certified duty as cinephiles to support good movies, so that we send a positive signal to movie studios about which ones we actually like. If that means skipping out on “Madame Web,” so be it. You’d save yourself a great deal of trouble by letting your own gut instinct make that decision rather than the algorithm. And “Madame Web” is more than likely to fizzle down to a pulp and dissipate from the multiplex within four weeks anyway. Its fate is sealed. Yours is not.

Now playing in theaters.