2024 | PG-13 | starring Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor, Adam Scott, Mike Epps, Emma Roberts, Tahar Rahim, Zosia Mamet | directed by S. J. Clarkson | 1h 56m | 1 1/2 out of 5 stars |
Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson) starts to experience clairvoyant powers, which puts her in the path of a tech millionaire (Tahar Rahim), also with clairvoyant powers, seeking to stop 3 teenagers (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor) who he believes will become superheroes and end his life in the future.
Madam Web is the kind of movie that the modern superhero genre needed to birth for a very long time. After a decade long run of Marvel films setting the standard for the genre, D.C. following it and now Sony trying to get in on the action, it would be inevitable that a movie as fundamentally broken as this would be released. I mean that because there are a lot of bad ones, a lot of movies that are rushed, illogical and ill-advised. Black Adam, The Flash, Captain Marvel and The Marvels, Ant Man and the Wasp Quantumania and every Thor movie except for Ragnarok. But all of those movies, even the weakest ones, are still weak by their own high standards, they’re bad, but the studios are gate-keeping them so tightly and quality controlling so much of them that they still have merit – even if those merits are technical in an internet world where web critics claim they just want to see a good story. Few movies are allowed to fall apart quite like Madam Web. Few movies achieve this bottom-of-the-barrel, direct-to-video quality that this movie does. It’s a shocker, but it’s also inevitable. Success results in hubris and hubris results in laziness and there are few movies released this year as lazy as this one.
Nobody in this movie seems to care about what they are doing; and it shows on screen. That includes star Dakota Johnson who is allowed a Kristen Stewart level of disengagement to make it into the final cut of projects she visibly doesn’t care for. It’s a measure of how little of Madam Web works that Dakota Johnson’s performance is also, simultaneously, the best thing in the movie. I’m all about more female jerks in movies and Cassandra Webb is a total jerk. She’s disengaged from her job, she hates kids, she hates her friends and family. She’s a paramedic that hates people. There is a “great” scene where she embarrasses herself at a friend’s (Emma Roberts, wasted) baby shower by awkwardly going on about her mother dying in childbirth. It’s a scene dragged out for laughs and Johnson is the only person who seems to get that. Director S.J. Clarkson sure doesn’t (another bad woman director, am I right?) whose choice for the movie’s tone rests at “Nothing”. It’s never fun or frightening, dower or thrilling. It’s just kind of in a white noise state for 2 hours.
When Webb (yes, I checked, the movie is called Web but the character it’s named after is “Webb”), decides to save these girls from this evil copywrite-free Spider-Man villain character, Simms, she can’t stand the sound of their voices. It’s the makings of a nice little journey to a maternal instinct the movie side-steps around in its quest to be about nothing. On the box-checking studio note, Merced and O’Connor’s characters are made math and science nerds (we know because one of their shirts says as much) so that Madam Web can inspire a generation of women to get into STEM.
The story is garbage from top to bottom, inside and out, macro and micro. On the micro level it is way more verbose than it needs to be, even for a mid-level action movie. Characters are constantly telling us what’s happening, or one step behind us to try to force the audience back to where the script wants. Or they are trading banter written by someone who has not heard teenage girls talk. In one scene where the girls are rescued and jump to another subway train, they “quip” that they don’t have a ticket – a movie-universe thing that audiences just accept. It’s just one of several cases where the best dialog choice would have been to say nothing.
On a macro level, this is my least favorite kind of story structure and one I would argue is the equivalent of the It’s All a Dream ending. The story in Madam Web happens because it happens. Meaning, our villain isn’t given a backstory or motives that direct him to make a series of action. He has a psychic vision and acts on it, directing events to bring that vision to life. This circular story, where people do things because they know they are going to do them, grinds my gears. It robs everyone of motive and agency and tell us where we are going. Solving your story issues with psychics is always bad, but starting your story with psychic visions should be banned. It also, by the way, happened this year with Netflix’s Sweet Tooth. Our characters go somewhere because they have a vision that they go there. Spare us.
As a superhero (villain?) origin story the movie doesn’t take the steps to build Webb’s journey up so that she comes to grips with her powers (she does hug her dead mother through the time-stream magic of spider venom). Unable to use her strength and skill the whole film results in Cassandra overcoming that by crashing cars into things, including in the slapped together fireworks mess of a finale. On the plus side, the movie looks like a lot of it was authentically shot in New York and Adam Scott comes out of it with his dignity. Johnson sleepwalks through the entire production and still carries it on her back. That’s really something. This is the superhero movie level check that the genre needed. It should be required viewing for people who cried that the mediocrity of The Marvels was the worst movie they’d ever seen. You’ve been spoiled.
Madam Web was released alongside a story that it was just so sexy that a pervert was dragged out of the theater for pleasuring himself to Sydney Sweeney in it. I call fowl. Sweeney is buried under a wig, glasses and jacket in this movie and spends all of 2 seconds in her superhero costume. This guy wouldn’t have made it to the zipper before it was over.