Best of the Worst of 2024: Madame Web
You might hate this movie, but not as much as Dakota Johnson does.
Dakota Johnson storms through Madame Web with an expression that silently but unmistakably conveys, “What the hell is all this ridiculous bullshit and why am I, a serious person, at the center of it?”
It’s a look appropriate for the character the premiere Nepo Baby is playing, an ambulance driver who gets tangled up in a weird web involving three teenager superheroes to be, psychic powers and a bad guy who looks like he bought a costume titled, for legal and copyright reasons, “Arachnid-Person” from Spirit Halloween and is referred to throughout, not inaccurately, as “Ceiling Guy” because he crawls on ceilings like some manner of Spider-Man.
He’s not Spider-Man, of course. Even the fat guy who played Spider-Man on television in the 1970s wanted too much money so they puzzlingly decided to make a Spider-Man movie without the element of every Spider-Man movie that audiences and critics alike hate with a white hot burning passion: Spider-Man.
Audiences fucking LOVE everyone even vaguely connected to Spider-Man. Take Morbius, the Living Vampire. He was only the subject of a masterpiece that broke every box-office record en route to sweeping the Academy Awards.
Kraven the Hunter? He’s more popular than Spider-Man, Batman and Superman combined! People lose their shit over Kraven the Hunter. It’s literally the craziest thing in the world that we haven’t experienced the bliss of an endless series of feature films about this most beloved and known of characters.
It’s weird that Marvel keeps making Spider-Man movies and separating them from the nonsense coming out of the Sony spider-verse like the container for McDonald’s McDLT kept the hot part hot and the cool part cool when he’s apparently such a scrub that he can’t even land a cameo in one of these instant classics.
But nobody within the world of Spider-Man is more exciting or glamorous or popular or beloved, or utterly deserving of their own movie, if not a series of films, than Madame Web.
Good old Madame Web. The Web-Meister. The Non Web-Slinger. Web-a-reeno looking through time!
That look of confusion mixed with mortification and a stubborn determination to get through all of this idiocy with her dignity intact also belongs to Dakota Johnson the actress.
Johnson’s trademark as a cult celebrity is a rare and admirable unwillingness to go along with all of the bullshit, posturing and white lies that come with being a movie star and having projects to promote.
So it is more than a little hilarious that she now finds herself at the center of a screamingly misguided would-be blockbuster that’s nothing but bullshit and posturing.
Johnson is the last person who should star in a movie like this, with the possible exception of Michelle Williams, the Academy Award-nominated heavyweight thespian who can be found in both Venom and Venom: There Will Be Carnage.
I remember reading an interview where Williams said she’d be very open and excited about doing a Lady Venom spin-off movie in what can only be deemed an untruth.
Madame Web opens in 1973 in Peru, with our heroine’s mother Constance (Kerry Bishé) looking for rare spiders before she is murdered by the film’s villain, Shitty Evil Spider-Man/Arachnid-Person/Ezekiel "Zeke" Sims (Tahar Rahim).
Decades later Shitty Spider-Man is haunted by images of three female teen superheroes murdering him for being possibly the lamest villain in comic book history.
The women taunting Arachnid-Person in his nightmares are three future Spider-Women in the form of Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), an awkward Catholic school student, Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor), a rich rebel with a distinct Sporty Spice thing going on and Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced) a tough survivor who has had to raise herself.
Sweeney’s casting is puzzling because she is one of our preeminent sex symbols and she is clad throughout in a Catholic schoolgirl get-up yet the film never succeeds in successfully sexualizing her.
Madame Web is so inept that it can’t make Sydney Sweeney in a skimpy, fetish-friendly outfit sexy when she ostensibly should be scorchingly hot even if clad in a giant potato sacks with holes for the eyes.
Sweeney delivers a weirdly low-energy performance that suggests the she’s in a pornographic movie about a sexy Catholic schoolgirl but they neglected to film any sex scenes or make the film sexy in any way.
Cassandra Webb sees these young girls in the course of doing her job alongside coworker Adam Scott (who is given nothing to do but hopefully picked up a big old paycheck) and senses that they are connected somehow, almost as if in some manner of giant metaphorical web encompassing them all.
Because Cassandra’s mom was bitten by a magical super-spider she has attained powers of clairvoyance but it’s a crappy kind of clairvoyance where she can see seemingly 40 seconds into the future and also is constantly experiencing deja vu.
If you like Deja vu then you will love Madame Web because holy crap do they ever abuse and misuse that trope.
If you like Deja vu then you will love Madame Web because holy crap do they ever abuse and misuse that trope.
If you like Deja vu then you will love Madame Web because holy crap do they ever abuse and misuse that trope.
You know that a superhero movie is on solid conceptual ground when it’s rooted in something like wishes or deja vu or being able to see nearly a minute into the future.
Cassandra is confused by her new powers. She has no idea what to do with them, possibly because they suck so badly they barely qualify as powers.
Even Cassandra seems disappointed in her powers. Madame Web is a new kind of action movie in that it has very little in the way of action. It keeps suggesting that at some point in the film something will actually happen but it never makes good on that fuzzy promise.
Even more puzzlingly, Madame Web is a superhero movie largely devoid of super heroism. Shitty Spider-Man crawls around trains and buildings and walls like some manner of Arachnid Person but we only get a glimpse of Cassandra’s teen proteges in costume and in action.
Cassandra doesn’t particularly care for the three future superheroes she is connected to in a weird way that she does not understand. They don’t seem particularly enamored of each other either.
Madame Web really makes you appreciate the chemistry among the leads in The Marvels and The Marvels as a whole. It was certainly not a perfect movie but it had a clear vision of what it wanted to do and how.
Madame Web, on the other hand, feels completely lost. With her trademark candor Johnson has admitted in interviews that the film’s script changed constantly, to the point where the finished screenplay looked almost nothing like what she’d signed on for.
Superhero movie exhaustion has kicked in hard. A long, long boom has finally led to a massive bust. That leaves Madame Web in a uniquely unfortunate position, in that it exists solely to set up sequels and spin-offs for which there will be no audience whatsoever.
Who could possibly want more of this? Certainly not Dakota Johnson. The same is true of the moviegoing public.
This is an origin story that’s all origin and no story.
Hollywood: you do not need to keep making superhero movies. It’s time for a break, a long, long break. Madame Web is damning, incontrovertible proof that this most ubiquitous of genres is beyond exhausted and could use a long, even permanent nap.
One Star out of Five
::Madame Web is so inept that it can’t make Sydney Sweeney in a skimpy, fetish-friendly outfit sexy when she ostensibly should be scorchingly hot even if clad in a giant potato sacks with holes for the eyes.
::Sweeney delivers a weirdly low-energy performance that suggests the she’s in a pornographic movie about a sexy Catholic schoolgirl but they neglected to film any sex scenes or make the film sexy in any way.::
I know this will break your heart, Nabin, but maybe the reason Sydney Sweeney isn't sexualized is because the director isn't a horny, arrested-adolescent dude who drools all over his Japanese schoolporn *hentai*.
The director, S.J. Clarkson, is a woman, and British. This is her first theatrical feature as a director, though she's worked a lot in UK and US television, including episodes of ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK, JESSICA JONES, and SUCCESSION. It's likely the reason Dakota Johnson look the gig in the first place is because she and Clarkson hoped to make a smart superhero movie with all-female heroes....
I’m in the minority in thinking Johnson isn’t some subversive genius but someone who either knows her privilege exempts her from the game or who is kind of dumb and doesn’t recognize the game exists. She doesn’t have to do anything she doesn’t want to, but she’s most famous for this dreck and 50 Shades of Gray.