Movie Review: 'Madame Web' Starring Dakota Johnson

Madame Web (2024)

Directed by S.J Clarkson

Written by S.J Clarkson, Matt Sazama, Claire Parker

Starring Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O'Connor, Tahar Rahim, Adam Scott

Release Date February 14th, 2024

Published February 16th, 2024

What was literally anyone who made Madame Web thinking? One look at the costumes should have told everyone we've made a terrible error. A glimpse of this shapeless, repetitive, and downright irritating script should have been more than enough to halt the production. And yet, through some horrifying faustian bargain, Madame Web exists. Sony's Wish.com version of the Marvel Universe, which somehow has already birthed the deathly deformed Morbius, has somehow told the Universe to hold its beer while it evacuated something even more foul onto the Earth in Madame Web.

Dakota Johnson, an actress known for not suffering bad scripts, see the Fifty Shades movies where she is taking the piss and the paycheck through three movies, somehow stars as the titular Madame Web, a future Superhero guru. This is her origin story. The origin story of the person who will become the blind trainer to a trio of actual superheroes. We're literally getting an origin story not for the introduction of a new action hero, but the lady who will teach three other people how to be superheroes. It's like getting a biopic of Lebron James's High School basketball coach. It's mildly interesting but Lebron is defintely where the story should be.

I'd launch into a plot description but the plot is just pitiful. Cassie, s00n to be 'Madame' Web is an EMT in New York City. She resents her late mother who died in childbirth somewhere in Brazil while searching for a rare spider. Cassie grew up in foster care and we know this because she's tough and unsympathetic. When she saves a woman's life and that woman's small child gives Cassie a crayon drawing as a gift, Cassie's too tough to accept it and appears deeply confused as to what this emotion of 'gratitude' is. Johnson's irritation at playing such rudimentary emotions comes through in the complete lack of conviction she gives her every gesture and line delivery.

Eventually, after an ungody length of time, Cassie begins to get her super power, the worst super power imaginable. Cassie can see into the future. She can see about a minute into the future. Yes, her Spider Bite mutation power is basically deja vu. She glimpses a full 60 seconds into the future and can change the events she sees. Thus, on a train to attend a friend's funeral, she sees three teenage girls murdered in a series of interminible flash forwards. Rather than have all three teens on the train, Cassie's vision shows each enter the train at different times and each murdered in three different flash forwards. These scenes were edited by someone who apparently also could only see one minute into the future and thus felt the need for such needless repetition.

One of hottest stars of the moment, Sydney Sweeney is one of the three teenagers but you'd be forgiven if you didn't notice her. For all her ferocious charisma on TV's Euphoria and her hit rom-com, Anyone But You, Madame Web finds Sweeney playing an awkward, shy, and gawky character, forever stuck in the High School movie trope of the attractive girl who doesn't know she's attractive until she takes off her glasses. That would be funny if this were a parody movie, but this is a dour, straight ahead super hero movie, thus this trope is deadly, dumb, and dopey. It renders a radiant movie star as a lost puppy desperate to find shelter from the harsh light of the world.

The rest of the cast would take too long to introduce and they don't matter much anyway. Nothing against them, I don't think Madame Web is their fault. The failure here lands squarely on the shoulders of Sony Executives whose heedless greed and desperate avarice keep them clinging like Gollum to their precious Spider-Man universe of characters, hoping that their next desperate grab for cash will pay off and keep the lights on long enough for Tom Holland and Zendaya to come home. It's comic in its pathetic poignance. The sad state of Madame Web can also be blamed on director S.J Clarkson, a desperately overmatched filmmaker with a knack for directing actors to give their absolute worst performances.

Supporting players like Mike Epps, Emma Roberts, Adam Scott, and Zosia Mamet all appear in this movie and each delivers a performance worse than the last. They give zero energy, zero life to their words. They barely exist on screen, as if they thought they were merely rehearsing only to find out that Clarkson had yelled 'Cut, Print, Moving On.' Poor Tahar Rahim gets the worst of it all. He's the villain of the piece and is forced to suffer wearing a knockoff Spider-Man outfit while spouting inane villain dialogue that constantly spells out why he's trying to kill three seemingly random teenage girls. If you miss his motivation the first 10 times, don't worry, he will repeat himself again.

By the time Madame Web reaches a merciful conclusion the only memorable aspects of the movie, beyond how awful it all is, is the product placement and a shockingly prominent Public Service Announcement for C.P.R. Pepsi has a big role to play in the final act of Madame Web as a portion of a Pepsi sign remains prominently in play through the final 15 minutes of the movie. The film flashes to the Pepi sign relentlessly via Cassie's visions of one minute into the future when the sign will be a weapon against the baddie. It's hilariously stupid. I do hope Pepsi didn't pay too much for this prominent product placement because the return on investment here is not going to be much.

Then there is C.P.R. The film stops dead to give the three teenage protagonists of the movie a lesson in C.P.R. It's a comically long scene and you can sense someone behind the camera directing the technique as if it were going into a television commercial for lifesaving technique and not a massive comic book movie. Cassie says that C.P.R is capable of counteracting the villain's main evil power, poisoning his victims and paralyzing their heart. Thus, at the end of the movie, C.P.R is there to save the day again as if the movie were about C.P.R and not, in fact, a multi-million dollar superhero movie in the Sony Spider-Verse.

Madame Web is a shockingly awful movie. In the past decade or so Hollywood's homogenizing effect on movies had reached a place where most bad movies were a thing of the past, replaced by desperately mediocre movies, boring movies that were, at the very least, professionally crafted and sensible in design. Madame Web is a throwback to a time when seemingly no one was in charge and movies of terrible quality and taste could sneak out of the studio gates and on to the big screen for the world to see. Badly acted, badly written, badly directed. There is very little about Madame Web that isn't unrelentingly awful. In a strange way, I admire that. It's been a minute since I have seen a major studio make a movie this inept. Bad movies still exist but they live on obscure streaming services, not in mainstream movie theaters. Madame Web marks a rare mainstream return for the truly bad movie.

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