Madame Web [Review]
Sony Pictures’ latest Spider-Man adjacent thriller fails to impress
Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson). Image credit: Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures
Columbia and Sony Pictures’ latest foray into Spider-Man adjacent films is director S.J. Clarkson’s Madame Web. The titular character is a relatively obscure Spider-Person. Frankly, when I heard this film was greenlit I was puzzled. Puzzled, but hopeful that the studio picked this character because they could surprise audiences with something unexpected and great. Boy, was I disappointed.
The movie opens in 1973, with very pregnant Constance Webb (Kerry Bishè) in the Peruvian Amazon with Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), searching for a legendary spider whose venom has powerful curative properties. When she finds the spider, Ezekiel shoots her and steals it for himself. As Constance lays bleeding out, local legends the “Arañas” swoop in to save her. The tribe administers the venom, but it’s too late; Constance dies in childbirth and only the newborn is saved.
Thirty years later, Cassandra “Cassie” Webb (Dakota Johnson) is a paramedic in New York City. Our heroine’s name is a bit on the nose, but that’s not the movie’s fault. Cassie has a near death experience while saving a man’s life and when her partner Ben Parker (Adam Scott)—yes, that Ben Parker—resuscitates her, a latent power emerges: she can see the future.
Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor), Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson), Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced), and Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney). Image credit: Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures
Meanwhile, Ezekiel is searching for three teen girls who he believes will gain spider powers and murder him, based on a nightly vision that haunts him. These girls and future Spider-People, played by Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O’Connor, function as MacGuffins with sad backstories rather than as characters. Of course, clairvoyant Cassie runs into the girls on a subway, has a vision of their deaths, and rescues them. She must now protect them from Ezekiel while trying to figure out how everything is related and what her powers mean.
All this results in a muddled narrative built on coincidences with a script that apes story beats from Terminator while awkwardly dropping in hero cliches. Here’s an example: at one point in the movie, out of nowhere and in the middle of the height of danger when we should be expecting a climax, Cassie drops everything and flies to Peru for a week to find answers. This results in a single scene where she casually strolls through the Amazon without urgency and meets a mystical mentor, the man who saved her as a baby, who gives her a tropey speech about discovering her potential. Cut and she’s back in New York. Why is this explicitly mentioned to be a seven day trip, and there’s not so much as a montage? Why is this leisurely scene that leaves every other character hanging even here?
Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim). Image credit: Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures
Dakota Johnson’s character spends most of the film not wanting her responsibility or to be there, but as an actor she also seems to not want to be involved either. Hers has got to be the most uninterested, checked-out performance I’ve seen in a long time. Either she was miserable here, Clarkson failed in directing her, or both. Tahar Rahim’s flat and uninteresting performance as Ezekiel looks like it was put together in post. He’s barely present, and when he is, most of his dialogue happens when he’s looking away from camera. Even when we see him speak, it sounds like his voice was dubbed in. I also think the decision to put him in an evil looking Spider-Man costume was a weird choice; I’ve always liked his original character design of a silver-haired, barefoot man in a suit. How cool would it have been if he had looked like Tom Cruise in Collateral, but barefoot?
I don’t understand what’s going on with Sony Pictures’ complete inability to make a good live action Spider-Man adjacent film. Maybe if the movie had everything relating to spider powers cut and stuck to the base premise of a clairvoyant paramedic and villain there could have been room to sharpen the whole thing into a good thriller. As it stands, the movie is forgettable. I guess Madame Web is better than Morbius, but that’s not a high bar to clear.
Madame Web premiers exclusively in theaters on February 14, 2024.
