A Reel Review: MADAME WEB

For complicated legal reasons, the children at Sony Pictures own the rights to several of Marvel Comics’ superheroes and villains. On the rare occasions when they let the adults from Disney and Marvel Studios do the talking, we get masterworks like SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME (2021). When they don’t, we get stinkers like VENOM (2018), and MORBIUS (2022). Here in the early months of 2024, the toddlers are back making a mess in their diapers with MADAME WEB. 

 

Cassie Web (Dakota Johnson), suddenly develops the ability to see into the future. Her new clairvoyance helps her save the lives of three teenagers (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor), from an attack by Ezekiel, a spider-like villain (Tahar Rahim), who is having visions of his own death by the hands of the three teens.

 

Directed by S.J. Clarkson, MADAME WEB serves as an origin story for the Spider-Man on-and-off ally or villain, and in a way, an origin story for the three teens who will eventually become variations of Spider-Woman. Spidey is absent here (sort of, more on that later), and the teens are far from their superpowers, so the focus is on Cassie as she wrestles with her new powers…which has a connection to the death of her mother at the hands of Ezekiel. 

 

MADAME WEB starts off as a chase film, with Cassie and the three teens running for their lives and hiding across New York and New Jersey while Ezekiel pursues them. But the script (which has a baffling number of four writers), finds reason to cram in a ton of backstory for the four leads. The chases pause for incredibly clumsy and awkward exposition; characters stop and blurt out endless chunks of dialogue to get out where they are from and what they are thinking…speaking in ways no real human talks, even for a superhero/fantasy film. 

 

MADAME WEB wants the hook to be the relationship between Cassie and the teens, but this is handled too lightly. The teens are paper-thin, and Cassie isn’t given anything to work with. Worse, director S.J. Clarkson is over her head in directing action; the fight scenes are a haphazardly cut mess and offer no tension or fun. The film also takes leaps in its own logic; Cassie leaves the teens behind for a trip to Peru to find answers to her powers (a trip that is handled like a run to the grocery store), and most of the set-pieces make no sense. And by movie’s end, not everything is resolved. CGI is like watching a cartoon from the 80’s. 

 

Acting is all over the place. Dakota Johnson has little to do. Sydney Sweeney is the best of the three teens but is under-used. Adam Scott appears as Cassie’s best friend Ben Parker, who is very excited about becoming an uncle for the first time in an extended and blunt Easter Egg. Tahir Rahim is bloody awful. 

 

After a boring final battle and a predictable outcome, MADAME WEB feels like a superhero film made in the early 1990’s, when no one really knew how to adapt super-characters to cinema. It’s lame, dull, un-fun, and barely qualifies as a b-movie. The toddlers at Sony Pictures have once again wet the bed. 

 

BOTTOM LINE: Fuck it