Madame Web movie review: absurdly tangled

They’re just trolling us now. Hollywood. The entertainment-industrial complex. We gave them our geeky all: our money, our attention, our time. From 80s GenX kids *raises hand* who leaned hard into mega franchises — Star Wars, Back to the Future, and beyond — to the early Zoomers who came of cinematic age with the beginning of the MCU in the post 9/11 era… some of us even molded our entire personalities around the wonderfully engaging, smartly fantastical stories they told us. That was always going to be a bad idea, and now that bad idea is slapping all of us in the face: We gave them our hearts, and now they’re giving us garbage. Because they think they can get away with it. Because they took us for granted.

Look: superhero fatigue might not have been a thing with audiences if the movies had just, you know, kept up. Not been junk. Yes, making movies is hard, but it’s not that hard, because cinemaniacs are always able to forgive a lack of resources. But a lack of authenticity? A lack of genuine enthusiasm? Not so much. These movies didn’t need to get bloated — bigger, ahem, isn’t always better — and they didn’t need to require homework, like watching all the ancillary streaming series. This isn’t how it had to be. They could have… just… given us good, honest stories.

Madame Web? It’s almost impossible to see this travesty as a goodnatured mistake. This is a movie sprouted solely from the depths of corporate cynicism. From Sony attempting to glom onto the success for another studio of the MCU even though the company owned nothing of Marvel Comics except Spider-Man. And so in recent years we’ve gotten Spider-Man–adjacent flicks from Sony including Morbius and two Venom flicks. And now Madame Web. They’ve all been nothing but pop-culture jokes, and Sony doesn’t seem to grasp why.

You do not have to be deeply invested in comic books — as I am not – to feel like Madame Web the movie makes no damn sense at all, doesn’t even realize what it has here. Bad enough that its central character is a woman called Cassandra Webb. Who can see the future. Thanks to the bite of an exotic spider. I mean: Cassandra… Webb…? That’s some deeply, deliciously cheesy pulp nonsense, and how do you not lean way the hell into that? (Instead, her precognitive visions mean we get to witness the terrible action scenes over and over again, yay.) This movie hasn’t got the foggiest idea of its own potential, but way worse, it hasn’t got even the faintest sense of humor. It’s so solemn, so serious. And yet…

The movie’s Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson, bless: Bad Times at the El Royale, Fifty Shades Freed) is a paramedic in New York City in 2003. Why 2003? Is it to capitalize on the very solemn, very serious hangover from 9/11 in which the city was of course still wallowing a mere two years later? Especially for a paramedic, whom we might expect would have seen some traumatic shit that day? LOL, not at all. As far as I can determine, it’s so the movie can insert itself into the Tom Holland–as–Spider-Man timeline as established by the MCU. Because Cassie’s EMS partner is called Ben Parker (Adam Scott, the best thing here: The Disaster Artist, Fun Mom Dinner). Whose sister Mary (Emma Roberts: Palo Alto, We’re the Millers) is hugely pregnant and about to pop with a baby boy whose name she has not yet settled on.

I’ll spell out the tease for those who don’t get it (though I’m not sure why you’d have any interest in reading a review of Madame Web if you didn’t): the blatant implication is that Mary is about to give birth to Peter Parker, who will become Spider-Man a decade and a half later, while he is being raised by his Uncle Ben and Aunt Martha May. (There’s no Martha May here, but Ben does ominously drop the news that he’s just “met someone.” *groan*) [ETA: Martha? Why did I say that name? Why did I say that name?!]

The desperation to ride the Spider-Man coattails is pathetic enough, but what are the odds that Ben Parker would happen to have two different unrelated people in his life who have acquired superpowers through a spider bite? Cassie’s spider wasn’t radioactive, just a naturally exotic denizen of the Amazonian rain forest — see, her mom (Kerry Bishé: The Fitzgerald Family Christmas, Argo) was researching these spiders while hugely pregnant, and was bitten just before giving birth and dying. And then, when Cassie, bizarrely, steps out of the 2003 action to take a side trip to Peru to investigate, she meets the local tribesman (José María Yazpik) who helped her mom and knows all about the spider bite, and gravely intones: “When you take on the responsibility, great power will come.” It’s like what Peter Parker learns about great power and great responsibility, but flipped, or something.

Honestly, it’s exhausting trying to find ways to boil down all the convoluted, coincidence-laden nonsense of this movie in a way that doesn’t make me sound incoherent. Watching it all unfurl onscreen is kinda gobsmacking, yet also way duller than you’d imagine — it’s not even so bad it’s fun. And I’ve barely scratched the surface! Never mind Uncle Ben being knee-deep in spider-people — after the events of this movie, when Peter Parker’s Spider-Man comes along later, the people of New York shoulda been, like, What, more weirdoes in spider spandex? Cuz, like… Cassie ends up mentoring three teenage girls (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced [Dora and the Lost City of Gold], and Celeste O’Connor) to become spider-themed crime fighters, and their origin story — which is also what this movie is about — involves battling wealthy businessman Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim [Mary Magdalene, Grand Central], shamefully wasted), who also has spider powers and spider spandex. The movie has no idea why Sims is evil or what he does in his spider spandex when he’s not trying to kill these girls. The movie doesn’t even know what sort of “business” he’s in. It’s all a bafflingly lazy stew of comic-book clichés. (One of the girls mentions, totally randomly, her “Uncle Jonah,” the only purpose of which is to make you think of J. Jonah Jameson, the newspaper editor who will later employ Peter Parker as a photographer.)

We can “blame” screenwriters Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless (who together wrote Gods of Egypt and Dracula Untold), Claire Parker, Kerem Sanga, and S.J. Clarkson. (Clarkson also directs, her feature debut after a long career as a TV director. This movie often has the small, cheap look of a 1990s cable show.) But they will have had little control over much of what we are subjected to here. It’s plain that Sony actually had little trust in fan interest in the Madame Web character as she is depicted in the comics: she is an elderly woman, disabled because of an autoimmune and neuromuscular disorder, with multiple psychic superpowers (none of this the result of a spider bite!). She could have been, onscreen, another Charles Xavier, X-Men’s Professor X. But that would have required casting a much older woman in a very different sort of story. The beginning of where this all went so disastrously wrong is right there: Sony didn’t really want to make an authentic Madame Web movie. It just wanted to wring whatever it could out of its sliver of Marvel Comics.

At least the lack of a postcredits scene feels like a blessing. Perhaps we’ll escape getting a sequel.

more films like this:
• Spider-Man [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Disney+ US]
• Captain Marvel [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK | Disney+]