For certain film buffs, Madame Web was one of their most anticipated movies of 2024, but probably not for the reasons Sony had hoped or intended.
Ever since the first official trailer for Madame Web dropped and blessed audiences with the iconic meme, “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders just before she died,” everyone knew right away that this movie probably wouldn’t be great. So much so that the film was actively being compared to Morbius, Sony’s previous entry in their (No) Spider-Man Cinematic Universe that centered around an obscure Spider-Man character, was poorly received both critically and financially, and was heavily memed (i.e. It’s Morbin’ Time). However, comparing Madame Web to Morbius is incredibly insulting to the latter film because, somehow, Sony has released a film that makes Morbius look like Citizen Kane. Miraculously, Madame Web manages to be even stupider, more incompetently made, and lazily written than Morbius, and yet, despite these flaws, it unintentionally has become the funniest film of 2024 thus far.
Madame Web is the fourth film in Sony’s (No) Spider-Man Cinematic Universe and follows a young woman named Cassandra “Cassie” Webb (Dakota Johnson) who works as a paramedic in New York City along with her partner and friend, Ben Parker (Adam Scott). Cassie almost drowns while attempting to save a civilian, and while Ben manages to save Cassie at the last minute, her near-death experience unlocks her hidden ability to look into the future. Using her powers, Cassie sees three teenage girls (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O’Connor) being hunted down by a man named Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim). As you can probably guess, Cassie predictably uses her powers to protect the teenage girls from the dastardly evil villain while also attempting to understand her psychic powers and how they link back to her mom…who was in the Amazon researching spiders before she died.
Madame Web is a movie that is just so fundamentally broken and so hilariously awful that it’s kind of impossible to go in-depth about everything this film fails to accomplish without going through every scene in excruciating detail. For example, the opening 10 minutes alone is so poorly conceived that I constantly thought, “Was that real?”. When Ezekiel predictably betrays Cassie’s, it is filled with so many random yet funny out-of-place crash zooms that it feels less like a dramatic superhero moment and more like a scene from Michael Scott’s Threat Level Midnight. However, as funny as this directorial decision was, this opening 10 minutes is the only time crash zooms are utilized, as there are no other moments in the movie where this technique is used again.
This quick abandonment of crash zooms is simply a tiny part of a more significant issue that Madame Web suffers from – an unfocused and unclear vision. The movie is filled with so many concepts, characters, and plot points that initially seem essential but are quickly abandoned and either never brought back or so vaguely explored that they play practically no role within the greater plot. For example, the film introduces Ben (Spider-Man’s uncle) and Mary Parker (Spider-Man’s mom) and makes them seem like they will be important characters considering their relationship with Spider-Man, but after the first act, they are never seen again until the film’s climax.
Even then, their presence in the last act is limited to a car chase and a tongue-in-cheek moment in which Cassie jokes that Ben will be more involved in Peter’s life than he thinks. Ben and Mary’s inclusion feels incredibly obligated as they have no purpose being in Madame Web other than to tease the fact that Spider-Man might show up someday in this (No) Spider-Man Cinematic Universe. At best, Ben and Mary are nothing more than glorified Easter eggs.
Additionally, the film introduces other nonsensical ideas that are immediately abandoned and only exist to create the illusion of tension. For example, the film shows that Ezekiel can infect anyone he touches with spider venom. However, despite dedicating almost 10 minutes of exposition delivered by Cassie about how dangerous this spider venom is and how they can use CPR to combat it, Ezekiel never uses this power again. Madame Web also reveals that the government is hunting down Ezekiel. However, like with the spider venom, this is immediately abandoned and forgotten the moment after Ezekiel kills a government agent, as there is no callback to this scene nor any mention of government agencies chasing after him.
Speaking of which, Ezekiel Sims is the worst aspect of this entire film and quite possibly one of the worst villains in any superhero movie. However, the reasoning for Ezekiel being a horribly constructed character goes beyond the fact that he’s essentially a Saturday morning cartoon villain with no depth and is evil for the sake of being evil. It is incredibly obvious that Tahar Rahim had to rerecord his lines for the film, and while there’s nothing inherently wrong with ADR, the lines that are dubbed in are so haphazardly thrown together that it makes any scene involving Ezekiel clunky and awkward to watch. Additionally, the bits of dialogue that are ADRed don’t even match the lines he clearly says on set. This terrible sound mixing actively hurts Rahim’s performance, resulting in a character who sounds like he’s changing accents every 10 seconds. This level of incompetency is so egregious that it’s hard to believe that a studio-produced movie with an $80-$100 million budget would allow such sloppiness.
However, while Rahim did a lousy job playing Ezekiel, the other actors didn’t exactly do better. Dakota Johnson’s performance as Cassie was so stiff and lifeless that it was often difficult to discern whether this was just how the character was written or if Johnson acted this way on purpose. It felt as if Johnson was channeling Tommy Wiseau and Neil Breen to play this character because every single line she delivers is entirely flat. Throughout the film, Cassie seems incapable of expressing any sort of emotion except apathy or slight annoyance. Even during the action scenes in which she is supposedly portrayed as this triumphant superhero, it’s hard to take anything Cassie says or does seriously. While the other actors in the film do a slightly better job, by the second half of the film, they drift towards exuding a similar sense of lifelessness that Johnson is giving in her performance.
The action scenes in Madame Web are so atrocious that they feel more reminiscent of the fight scenes in a Taken film than any modern superhero movie. The film is littered with so much shaky cam and quick cuts that it made virtually every action scene incomprehensible to watch. Even something as simple as scenes featuring Cassie driving an ambulance through the street is cut every two to three seconds, making it impossible to understand what is going on. The final action scene in Madame Web was so terribly edited and nauseating that I wanted to hurl at a certain point. In an era filled with precise, cleanly shot action movies like John Wick and Mad Max: Fury Road, this Taken/Jason Bourne-style is wholly unacceptable. The fact that it is so prominently featured in this big-budget superhero movie is a joke.
However, despite Madame Web being this colossal technical failure, I still highly recommend checking out the film because, quite frankly, it is very rare to see cinematic disasters this big in theaters anymore. Watching the movie stumble so consistently and fail to achieve even the most basic rules of filmmaking is so funny and entertaining to watch that there was never a moment where it dragged on or became boring. The film flew by, and honestly, I want to watch it again. Madame Web is up there with movies like The Last Airbender, Catwoman, Batman and Robin, The Mummy (2017), and The Happening in terms of being deliciously funny, so-bad-it’s-good blockbuster garbage and should be enjoyed within this context. Madame Web is not a good movie, but it can be enjoyed as an entertaining comedy under the right mindset.
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