Directed by S.J. Clarkson, Madame Web stars Dakota Johnson as Cassandra “Cassie” Webb, who gains precognition powers, powers connected to a spider her mother found while doing research in Peru. Cassie’s mother’s fellow researcher Ezekiel Sims, played by Tahar Rahim, betrays the rest of the research team, leaving her mother dead and Ezekiel in possession of the spider. 30 years later, Cassie, now a paramedic, gains the aforementioned clairvoyant powers, eventually using them to protect three potential future spider-powered heroes, played by Sydney Sweeney, Isabel Merced, and Celeste O’Connor. The trio are being stalked by Ezekiel, who has also gained precognition abilities that showed him possible futures in which one of the three kill him.
The Madame Web of the comics is a fun, sometimes multi-layered character and would be a perfect addition as a co-star or a supporting character in a Spider-Man film somewhere down the line. But really, no one was asking for a Madame Web film—or a Morbius movie or a Kraven the Hunter vehicle, for that matter. That’s not to say that taking a comic character with limited familiarity by the general public can’t yield positive reviews and box office success. The positive receptions for Ant-Man, Black Widow, and Black Widow are testaments to that.
But the key to those movies’ successes are combinations of great direction, tight scripts, clear visions, and enthusiastic actors. And Madame Web fails on every point in some form or fashion. Based on the Blu-ray’s special features and press interviews, Clarkson is clearly a fan of the comics and this movie seemed to be one that she wanted to make. However, it’s unclear whether the failure of the film was from possible studio interference or from the screenplay and story, which feels so slapped together you can still smell the glue drying. Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless and Claire Parker & S.J. Clarkson wrote the screenplay, with Kerem Sanga, Sazama, and Sharpless given story credits, and additional literary material contributed by Chris Bremner. Sazama and Sharpless are responsible for writing 2022’s Morbius film, which explains a lot, given the mixed bag that movie was. The frustrating part is that Sony has shown that it can make a good Marvel film, from the recent Spider-Man films and even the first Venom, a film that wasn’t really my taste but I think was mostly competently made.
All of this feels like dog-piling and kind of mean. I legitimately don’t think most people set out to make a bad movie (with “bad” being somewhat subjective). But boyo, Madame Web was a slog to watch, and it feels like it might have been a slog for the actors to perform in. Johnson famously was alternately snarky and disinterested during press junkets for the film’s publicity, to the point that it rankled Sony’s feathers. There are hints of that in Johnson’s line delivery in the movie proper as well, because whether it’s the fault of the script or her acting choices, Cassie never feels like an actual human character delivering actual human emotions. She protects the three spider-folk, but I don’t know why she does other than “it’s the right thing to do” and that the screenplay necessitates it to drive the plot.
