Madame Web: Film Review
Dakota Johnson‘s first foray into the superhero world has been absolutely slated by critics, with some calling Madame Web the worst superhero movie ever. It’s pretty bad but I wouldn’t go quite that far.
Set in 2003, the story follows paramedic Cassie Webb (Johnson) who develops clairvoyant powers after an accident. She can see what’s about to happen, Final Destination style. She discovers that three girls – Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Anya (Isabela Merced) and Mattie (Celeste O’Connor) – are about to be killed by Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), who possesses Spider-Man-like abilities and wears a creepy black Spidey suit. After rescuing them, she becomes their protector and has to keep saving them from Sims.
When the project was first announced, I wondered how it was going to work with Johnson as Madame Web, who is depicted in the comics as a blind and paralysed elderly woman with full clairvoyant powers. This is more of an origins story, showing us how she got her powers, their connection to her late mother and how she ended up like the traditional Madame Web.
This film clearly underwent significant changes in post-production and as a result, the narrative is messy and stilted and parts feel missing. The villain storyline is resolved far too quickly, the final stand-off is silly and underwhelming, there is little pay-off and the mentions of sisterhood and found family feel false and unearned.
The editing is also iffy within each scene, particularly the action sequences involving Rahim. The cuts are too quick and all over the place, leaving you disorientated, and none of the action scenes are up to par because of the choppy, baffling editing and the dodgy VFX. Thankfully, there aren’t that many action moments in here.
Director SJ Clarkson, in her feature directorial debut, and her three co-writers clearly struggled to tell this story and fit in all the necessary information and context in a smooth and digestible way. Some sections of dialogue were decent – particularly in the first half – but it really gets bogged down with exposition and struggles to recover after Cassie takes a trip to Peru. It has some decent ideas – I liked the diner sequence and Cassie trying to scale a wall – but those are outnumbered. Also, I’m embarrassed to admit this but the vague references to Peter Parker/Spider-Man went totally over my head.
The lead actresses did the best they could despite the clunky script. Johnson was solid and there was a good rapport between the younger girls. Merced, who I’ve praised for years, was excellent once again and O’Connor stood out as the more rebellious one. However, Rahim was a big letdown. Admittedly, his character was written poorly, but his performance was awful and some of his dialogue didn’t match up to his lip movements (bad ADR).
Madame Web would have been received as a perfectly serviceable superhero movie if it had been released in 2003 (the year it was set). But the standards are much higher now and this isn’t good enough. Sony needs to give up on their Spider-Man adjacent movies.
In cinemas now