This review was published on February 16, 2024. As of May 14, Madame Web is streaming on Netflix.
Like any true daughter of Hollywood, Dakota Johnson is a professional who understands that you have to work with the material you’ve got. Her breakthrough role as Anastasia Steele in the Fifty Shades movies was a triumph of never holding herself above lines like “Punish me! Show me how bad it can be!†or the requirement to bite her lip so frequently she must have needed ChapStick after every take. But even Johnson has her limits, and Madame Web, one of Sony’s attempts to build out its own Spider-Verse, blows so far past them that you can practically guess which scenes were shot last based on the degree to which its star has given up. In some sequences, Johnson gamely gives Math Lady meme face as her character, Cassandra Webb, first tries to accept and understand the precognitive powers she’s developing. In others, she recites her lines with the resignation of someone who has come to terms with the fact that she’s appearing in a real stinker. Girl, give us nothing! No, seriously, there’s no point in doing anything more.
Cassandra — Cassie to her friends, which include her EMT partner Ben (Adam Scott) and the trio of teenage girls she ends up trying to help — is one of the deeper cut characters that are pretty much all that’s left for Marvel and DC movies to dredge up at this point. Aside from a late-breaking and wildly mangled ability to be in multiple places at one, Cassie’s powers, which develop after a near-death experience, involve an ability to see the near future. It could make for an interesting exercise, pitting someone with knowledge and foresight but no physical gifts against Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), a proto-Spider-Man villain who can climb walls, punch hard, and poison with his touch. But Madame Web, helmed by prolific British TV director S. J. Clarkson, can’t come up with a remotely exciting way to pit these two against each other. Ezekiel wants to kill three high-schoolers — the meek Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), the requisite STEM girl Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced), and the rebellious Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor) — because he’s plagued by prophetic dreams in which the three, costumed and superhuman, kill him. Cassie’s own visions are rendered in smeary bursts that are hard to make out, and even after she reluctantly becomes the girls’ protector, she mostly only anticipates new and not especially cool-looking ways to run away.
Madame Web is draggy through most of its middle and inept by its end, but it’s also the kind of bad movie that is difficult to describe without making it sound awesome. For instance: It is set in 2003, as signaled by a Dangerously in Love ad and mention of Martha Stewart’s legal woes, for no obvious reason aside from the fact that it needs Ben (full name Ben Parker) to not yet be an uncle to his future Spider-Nephew. And yet — the movie plays bewilderingly coy about who Ben is. He refuses to say the name of the woman he’s started seriously dating (presumably May), and just when his pregnant sister-in-law Mary (Emma Roberts) is about to reveal her baby’s name, Ben and Cassie are called away to an emergency.
The movie takes place in New York, but Cassie does manage to take an effortless mid-movie jaunt to the remote Peruvian jungle to visit the place where the scientist mother (Kerry Bishé) she grew up resenting died. While there, she communes with some indigenous Spider-People who may be the stuff of legends, but who conveniently speak English, before popping back to Queens for the big finish. The climax, by the way, takes place in an abandoned factory prominently labeled with a neon Pepsi-Cola sign (there’s a lot of Pepsi product placement), but filled, for reasons unknown, with boxes and boxes of fireworks.
Superhero movies aren’t going away, but there’s a Schadenfreude in watching Madame Web and getting the feeling that the once-dominant genre is full-on dissolving like reality does toward the end of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s not just that studio execs obviously reworked the film to the point of incoherence, with Johnson herself freely admitting that the finished script was nothing like the one she signed on for. It’s that there is no evident vision to Madame Web at all, no sense of why anyone involved wanted to make it aside from the compulsion to keep milking this IP for whatever last drops of profit can be squeezed out. I wouldn’t say it’s joyless, because no film can be entirely without joy when it has Johnson hating on children and saying the line “Hope the spiders were worth it, Mom.†But it’s an $80 million project with no reason for existing aside from seeding spinoffs with the younger characters that are unlikely to actually happen. The more these movies have to serve as marketing campaigns for future installments, the less pleasurable they become as experiences in themselves. With Madame Web, at least, there’s no pretending that something good is coming down the pike. When Johnson settles into the “thinking hard†face that’s Cassie’s main expression, you have to wonder if she’s actually just considering firing her agents.