Madame Web doesn’t just scrape the bottom of the barrel—it finds new depths.
Decades into the comic-book-movie experience, filmmakers are still experimenting with the form. Madame Web, the latest in Sony’s vaguely intertwined series of films connected to the wider world of Spider-Man, is about a woman named Cassie Webb (played by Dakota Johnson) who discovers that she has clairvoyant powers. More noticeably, it’s about an ostensible superhero who approaches perilous danger and supervillain skirmishes with the laconic, standoffish energy one might associate with the ingenue of a Luca Guadagnino movie, not the umpteenth Marvel joint.
It’s certainly different to give the superhero-going audience a protagonist who seems uninterested in, and indeed actively exhausted by, the idea of doing good. But that kind of radical passivity can only go so far. Madame Web is allegedly here to offer spills and thrills, while weaving together new strands of a cinematic universe that includes other somewhat deranged Spidey movies such as Venom and Morbius—a misshapen side series sprouting out of the success of the broader Marvel movies. Instead, it gives us Johnson reading dialogue about studying spiders in the Amazon with a tone reeking of “contractual obligation.”
As with the Venom films and Morbius, I could never quite decide whether Madame Web’s ineptitude sparked the kind of giggly enjoyment one derives from watching a camp classic. Was the surreal lack of energy from all the actors a wry choice, or was I just watching the sleepiest superhero movie ever made? Supporting actors such as Sydney Sweeney and the delightful Adam Scott normally have a lot of charm, but here they favor drawling, understated line deliveries. As such, it’s hard to ever feel the stakes being raised, even as Cassie (who begins the film as a humble paramedic) starts to explore her dizzying powers of prediction.
What does this have to do with Spider-Man, or webs in general? Not too much. Even to a comic-book reader such as myself, Madame Web is something of an obscure character, a sort of human-arachnid seer who pops in and out of the action from time to time. In this film, inexplicably set in 2003, she’s just another 30-something bumming around New York, living alone with a cat. Cassie is an orphan, born to a spider researcher in the Amazon who died in childbirth, but her only superpowers are her killer bangs, red leather jacket, and disarmingly awkward personal style.
That is, until she has a near-death encounter while rescuing someone on the job, giving her bizarre visions of her immediate future. This steers her toward three young women—Julia Cornwall (Sweeney), Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor), and Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced), who all seem destined to become future heroes, but only if they manage to avoid a creepy, superstrong clairvoyant named Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim). But what will make them heroes, or why Ezekiel is plagued with visions of them attacking him, is left rather vague. Watching the film doesn’t bring a lot of further clarity. Setting the movie in the past seems to be a choice geared around the hypothetical potential of this cinematic universe—like Madame Web is getting a glimpse into intellectual property yet to come.
In her present, though, the action is almost embarrassingly low-key. Cassie is not a skilled hand-to-hand combatant, and she’s honestly a mediocre ambulance driver; most of the movie consists of her rushing her teenage charges away from danger. As a villain, Ezekiel is not particularly weighty; Rahim growls every bit of expository dialogue he can, but his motivations are hard to grasp beyond a fear of whatever future heroines these girls will become. For most of the movie, he’s not even really aware of Cassie or her powers.
I almost admire the sheer lack of effort on display in the acting, storytelling, and set pieces. To say that Johnson in particular phoned this performance in would be an insult to Alexander Graham Bell. It doesn’t help that every other performance has a strange, stilted energy; even when everyone’s in the same room together, too many line readings feel like they’re being delivered with a Zoom delay. And to be pedantic for a moment, plenty of contemporary Spider-Man movies and spin-offs have been released in the years since 2003, when this film is set, and none mentions the good Madame or her coterie of female sidekicks. So how can the filmmakers pretend that all of this adds up to something audiences might care about? If it wasn’t already clear that superheroic cinematic universes are no longer an exciting idea, Johnson’s involvement feels like a half-hearted wave goodbye.
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