Includes spoilers for this movie… but honestly does anyone care?

I think Rolling Stone said it best: “Madame Web Isn’t As Bad As You’ve Heard. It’s So Much Worse.” Usually a bad movie is a bad experience. But sometimes, a movie is so bad that it is actually entertaining. Madame Web seems to have crossed over into that territory where people are actually interested in seeing it just to see how bad it really is. Which, despite the supremely awful reviews, helps the movie at the box office in the long run. 

Madame Web is comically bad. Not comically as in based off of the comics (which it is but that’s not what makes it bad), but comically as in it becomes a comedy unintentionally. There are a smattering of jokes throughout the film, but it is not meant to be a comedy. Yet the theater I saw it in spent almost all of the movie laughing. Parts of this movie (okay most of this movie) are so absurd you honestly can’t help but laugh.

I don’t want to denigrate this movie just for the sake of piling on or joining the mob mentality, so let’s talk about what specifically makes it so terrible. Just starting at the base level of the plot. This is not a superhero movie. Dakota Johnson’s Cassandra Webb (the titular “Madame Web” even though she is never referred to this way in the movie) has the ability to see the future (and I guess also be in more than one place at the same time but that’s barely touched upon) which kind of helps her in battling the supervillain, but she’s still basically just a human woman with no special skills or fight training. There aren’t even really battles, more just like chases with the protagonists running away from the bad guy. I’ve seen some say it’s more like a slasher film in this way. Basically, Cassandra (or Cassie) develops her psychic abilities after a near-death experience and then has a vision of three young girls (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O’Connor) being attacked and killed by a man with “spider-like abilities”. She takes it upon herself to protect and save them. The reason the villain, named Ezekiel Sims, is after the girls is because he too can see the future and has a vision of the trio becoming Spider-Women and murdering him. He wants to kill them before they can later kill him. The problem (or one of many) is that we never see any of the girls develop powers in this movie. We see a brief glimpse of them in their superhero forms in Ezekiel’s vision, but that’s it. This entire movie is essentially a Spider-Woman prequel. Not even an origin story. We still don’t know how the girls get their powers. So why is this movie necessary? Why is this a story that needs to be told? Knowing absolutely nothing about the comic book character of Madame Web, I assumed she would be a Spider-Woman-like figure. But she actually ends up becoming more of the Charlie to the Charlie’s Angels trio of future Spider-Women. The Professor X of the X-Men (a comparison that’s made way too on the nose when Cassie ends up in a wheelchair at the end of the movie). The closest thing to a Spider-Man in this movie is the villain.

The villain. Marvel movies have long been criticized (even the original good ones) for having a “villain problem”. Essentially meaning that many of the antagonists are formulaic to a fault. They exist only to fulfill plot needs and have no complexity in their personalities or motivations. Ezekiel Sims in this movie is the worst possible case of this problem. We know virtually nothing about him except that he is the bad guy. We don’t really know how he got his powers, what his skill set is, or, mainly, who he even is. Yes, his motivation for going after the girls is that he wants to stop them from killing him before it happens. That much is clear. But he is evil before chasing our leads. He murders multiple people, including Cassie’s mom, in the Amazon years before the events of the film. So what are his motivations for becoming a villain in the first place? There is one throwaway line where he says (I’m paraphrasing but honestly not really), “I grew up with nothing. No one ever did anything for me. So no one else should get to have anything.” And that is the full extent of his character development.

The other issue with the villain is the performance. This is actually one of the most perplexing things about this movie to me. To be slightly fair, none of the acting in the film is particularly good. A lot of the line readings feel weird and stilted. That’s probably because of the horrible dialogue that sounds like a second grader wrote it. I’m sure it’s hard to give a good acting performance when you have to say lines that no real human would ever naturally speak. But Tahar Rahim as Ezekiel Sims is an entirely different story. I have no idea what happened here but it is pretty clear that most of the character’s lines are ADR. ADR stands for Automated Dialogue Replacement. This is the process of recording dialogue in a studio after filming to replace the initially recorded lines on set. This is usually due to bad sound quality recorded in the take that production wants to use in the finished product. But that cannot be the case for this entire performance. Maybe the studio wasn’t happy with how the performance came out or they completely rewrote the character after filming was over. Who knows? But it is so obvious that the dialogue we are hearing is not coming out of the mouth of the man on screen. They try really hard to not show his face any time he is talking to edit around it but, in the few times they do, we can see that his mouth moving does not match up to the words he is saying. Even the attempts to edit around showing his face become increasingly noticeable. In similar fashion, a line from the trailer spoken by Dakota Johnson (“He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died”) went viral in the lead up to the release for the awkward writing and delivery. This line does not actually appear in the movie, now leading many to wonder if that piece of dialogue was AI-generated specifically for the trailer. It’s genuinely astonishing to me how such poor editing and effects could even make it into theaters from a big name studio. The fact that a casual movie-going audience could notice these things and see the shoddy seams of the film. How many people had to see this and sign off on it for it to get this far? There is no explanation other than everyone has given up and/or does not care. The final product is funny, but the big picture is just sad.

The movie is full of references or allusions to the greater Spider-Man universe (in which this film does also take place even though, to be fully clear, it is not part of the central Marvel Cinematic Universe. I know it’s confusing and, if you don’t get it, it honestly doesn’t really matter). Cassie’s partner at her job as a paramedic is Ben Parker, better known to us as Uncle Ben. We also meet his sister-in-law, Mary Parker, who is pregnant with, you guessed it, Peter Parker (actually specifically Tom Holland’s MCU Peter Parker because this movie takes place in 2003). I read that the original concept for this film was to have Cassie have to protect Mary and her unborn child from a villain who knew the child would one day become Spider-Man. Kind of like Voldemort going after Harry Potter when he was a child after hearing the prophecy. I don’t know why they pivoted away from that plotline but now, in this version, Ben and Mary don’t have a real purpose in the film. They really only serve to be a part of winking comments that are supposed to be funny or ironic or cool because we know how it all turns out. But really, these allusions just feel like desperate attempts to remind audiences that this story has tangential ties to a franchise we know and love. Because the plot that plays out in the movie has no real bearing on any future stories we know or have seen (and will likely never see based on the failure of this film), it has to constantly justify its existence. Spoiler alert: it can’t.

I want to end on some (small) positives because nothing is 100% bad. They had a broken and cracked glass motif running through the whole film that mirrored the image of a spiderweb which I thought was cool and creative. I also want to give credit to Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney for trying their best with what they were given. Dakota Johnson just has this interesting, offbeat energy that made the movie probably funnier than it was intending to be but also made it more entertaining. This is also another instance where people are loving her press tour because she just says anything and does not care which works in the film’s favor from a marketing standpoint. I’m a Sydney Sweeney fan and I think she always kind of brings it. I was just disappointed because I really would have liked to see her get to actually be a version of Spider-Woman, being a hero and fighting crime, in this movie.

After being raucous and hysterically laughing throughout the whole movie, the entire theater burst into cheers and applause when it ended. One girl near me turned to her friend and said, “Honestly… it’s not that bad.” She was being generous. Because it really is that bad. It feels like an SNL parody of a movie. But, again, that doesn’t necessarily equal a bad time at the theater (lucky for Sony). I’ve seen people online calling this “the Cats of superhero movies”. For those who don’t remember, Cats was a movie so abominable, it became camp. People went to see it out of curiosity (how bad could it really be?) and amusement (like watching a trainwreck). They wore costumes and had parties in the theaters. So if you’re into that kind of thing, then this movie could be for you. It really does leave you wondering how something like this could even happen. But if you only like to watch things that are actually good, stay as far away from Madame Web as you possibly can.

2024 Count: 6 seasons, 10 movies