Review: Madame Web

Director: S. J. Clarkson

Stars: Dakota Johnson, Isabela Merced, Sydney Sweeney

In a perfect storm of superhero fatigue and internet meme culture, Dakota Johnson has swept blissfully underneath the online hubbub and snark directed at Madame Web – contempt generated largely thanks to a clumsy trailer and Johnson’s own exquisitely paced press debacle. She has been responsible for numerous lamentable soundbites while promoting the film, from referring to it as “like if A.I. generated your boyfriend’s perfect movie” while on SNL (a line surely written for her) to openly second-guessing the quality of the blue screen work (“I don’t know if this is going to be good at all!”). Even the last few days have provided gems (“I don’t know when I’ll see it. Someday.”) further adding to a comedic sense of ambivalence toward the project. The star’s uncertainty and legendary inability to lie convincingly (“I have always really loved… Marvel movies”) has created a fervour around Madame Web to mirror the great Morbius fiasco of 2022.

The potential for Madame Web to be received ironically, then, seems more and more likely, and now, having seen the thing, this is surely the only possible lens through which to eke any enjoyment out of it. If only Sony et al had the presence of mind to lean into it. At a late-December screening of Anyone But You I personally witnessed a crowd parroting along to the trailer’s already-notorious line “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.” A roomful of people were thrown off when it turned out the studio had lopped off the last four words for a new cut, presumably in a limp attempt to save face.

This could have been the superhero movie for the Tommy Wiseau crowd, it really could have. Instead it’s really for no one. Turns out the bigwigs clearly blanched at the widespread reaction to the trailer, because the line has now been wholly excised from the finished product, which trundles into cinemas as a barely coherent, often stupid, yet incredibly dull nadir for the superhero genre circa 2024.

The story takes place in a confused version of 2003, where we find Cassie Webb (Johnson) bumbling her way through life as a paramedic in New York opposite generic nice guy Ben (Adam Scott). Raised in foster care after her mother died while, yes, researching spiders in the Amazon, a life-threatening accident triggers in Cassie the sketchily rendered ability to catch glimpses of the future. It is in this baffled capacity that she runs into a trio of teenage girls seemingly being hunted by some kind of, uh, spider-person.

A frankly bizarre amount of what follows involves Cassie repeatedly abandoning Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Anya (Isabela Merced) and Mattie (Celeste O’Connor) so that she can run half-formed errands and enquiries into whatever is going on and how it relates to her mother and what it has to do with the generically rich and evil Ezekiel Sims (Tahir Rahim) and his one employee (Zosia Mamet). Quite what Ezekiel’s function in the world is when he’s not twirling his moustache remains a total mystery, which is fitting for a movie that stumbles across the starting line and never once finds a solid footing.

The editing is a persistent disaster, often breaking the 180 rule so that coherence within scenes is at best a happy accident, at worst a myth. S.J. Clarkson – who is experienced as a director of TV and film – seems to have no feel for sustained action. That’s usually fine when a studio hires an off-brand filmmaker because seasoned second units can cover off the techy/stunt-based material… except nobody on second unit seems to have a clue what they’re doing either. So action is kept to a minimum for much of the running time. When it does happen it manifests in brief, chaotic fits and starts. All Dutch angles and restless zooms. If you like a movie that feels like someone is perpetually dropping the camera, Madame Web is for you.

How bad is it? The movie culminates with an explosion at a fireworks factory and I came perilously close to dozing off. That’s probably not a good omen for action cinema.

It might’ve been refreshing to have a comic book flick that eschews spandex suits and gravity-defying physics for the majority of its duration, but for that to work what occurs instead needs more urgency than this. Johnson’s performance as Cassie echoes the astonishing disinterest of her press tour, and her co-stars seem to have taken this as a cue for how to react and respond to her. Everything and everyone comes off flat and awkward.

Granted, this provides a few unintentional howlers along the way. Cassie complaining that she “can’t even fold” a child’s drawing because “it’s like cardboard” (that notoriously foldable material, you mean?), or lightening the mood at a baby shower by flatly announcing “My mom accidentally died in child birth. Death in childbirth is super rare.”

Such mouth-agape nuggets are greedily harvestable, but they’re all there is here. The rest of the time Madame Web is just lamentably lame. One of the times Cassie abandons her teenage wards, it is to go to Peru(!), to find a lost civilisation. She finds it in about five minutes and their sole representative recognises her! From when she was a baby! At this point we’re also treated to an extended flashback to the movie’s first scene – an entire hour after we first saw it – in case we forgot it in the soporific soup that occurred in the interim.

The final scene completes the movie’s transformation into risible self-parody, complete with a lame popcorn fight that genuinely does seem directed by Tommy Wiseau, and the outright threat of more instalments to come. Post-production hesitancy second guesses that inevitability, however. In an act of kindness there are no post-credit stings, suggesting that someone behind the scenes had the good sense to realise that this plodding abomination might not only spell the end of the Sony spindle of superhero movies, but possibly the end of movies themselves.

I may flinch on returning to a multiplex anytime soon, just in case I’m confronted with anything else this shoddy. And if these words have added to the snarl of snark surrounding Madame Web and you feel encouraged to seek it out for yourself to see how much ironic fun can be gleaned from it, take the next two words to heart, please: Don’t bother.

I went so you don’t have to. In the blasé words of Cassie Webb, “Don’t do dumb things. Seriously.”