Madame Web

Fun-loving people on the internet would like you to believe that Madame Web is so bad it’s good. It’s not. It is so bad it’s depressing. It shows every symptom of a thing that was made but not cared about, dropped onto our desks the way a failing student passes in an exam they didn’t study for, wincing. It contains the most atrocious ADR (post-production dialogue dubbing) I’ve ever seen in a released studio film. To be so bad it’s good, it would need to be fun in some way — campy, weird, wild, a guilty pleasure. Madame Web is a guilty displeasure. The hour and fifty-six minutes we kill watching this can be better spent watching a better movie of the same length (say, Full Metal Jacket), reading, doing one’s taxes…

Madame Web is about a paramedic, Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson), who receives semi-psychic powers, which are sometimey and not under her control. The scenes having to do with Cassie’s visions are confusing to say the very least, since they barge into the narrative with no preparation or context; they’re also edited as incoherently as every other action scene is here. The gist of the story is that Cassie, whose dead mom was trying to find a special spider in Peru, must protect three teenage girls (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor) who are in danger from the movie’s big bad (Tahar Rahim), who has his own future visions in which he sees the girls, in superhero costumes, killing him. Thus does the movie spoil its own ending about twenty minutes in. 

Enjoy that glimpse of the girls in their Spider-Woman costumes — for that is their destiny, to be Spider-Women, as this film is Spider-Man-adjacent — in that early vision and right at the end, because that’s all you get in this supposed superhero movie. Most of it is a matter of Cassie and the girls running from the big bad, except for when Cassie pointlessly goes to Peru to find out her mom, who died while giving birth to her, was looking for that special spider so she could cure the disease she knew Cassie would be born with. The sequence seems about as useless as the scenes having to do with Ben Parker (Adam Scott), a fellow paramedic, and his pregnant sister Mary (Emma Roberts), who will give birth, the movie hints, to Peter Parker, aka the Spider-Man most of us know.

This movie isn’t really for a viewer who has never seen a Spider-Man film before, but neither is it for those who have seen every Spider-Man film (or even one). The screen is loaded with actors visibly wishing they were anywhere else, most certainly including the dull-affect Dakota Johnson, who narrowly loses the “Calgon, take me away” contest to Zosia Mamet as the big bad’s hacker. (Bored-looking Mamet sits at her monitor watching for the girls and delivering pearls like “I think I got them.”) The saddest/funniest aspect of the whole ordeal, though, is that it seems convinced it’s the first of many adventures with this quartet — the three superpowered girls commanded/protected by Cassie. There will be no such sequels. We will never see these characters again. There will be no great future stories with Madame Web, or Cassie Webb, or Jack Webb for that matter.

So the ending is one of those “The end? Nay — the beginning!” conclusions meant to make us thirst for more, when what we’re craving at that point is simple fresh air, or something stronger. Madame Web was directed by S.J. Clarkson, who also gets official screenwriting blame along with three others, and I suppose we’ve reached the point where women can make superhero movies as empty and unsatisfying as men can. Clarkson has been a prolific TV director, and I hope this film, whose problems are probably most accurately pinned on an insecure studio’s meddling, doesn’t squash her career. Tahar Rahim, too, is a better actor than this movie, which destroys his performance with that poor dubbing, would indicate. Nobody comes out of Madame Web looking good except maybe Kerry Bishé, who, as Cassie’s ill-starred mother, at least gets in and out fast. Everyone else has to pull on hip-waders and slosh through this sewage until the finish. 

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