“Madame Web” Review

Dakota Johnson develops the ability to see into the future in “Madame Web”, the latest film from Sony to be based on a character from Spider-Man comics.

Before I go on about my thoughts about “Madame Web”, I want to make things quite clear. I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed. Actually, that’s not true. I am furious and full of the most vindictive need for vengeance and satisfaction from the bastards that just wasted two hours of my life. I’m not talking about the actors, the director or anyone who was on this film’s crew. If you want to blame someone for “Madame Web’s” failure to elicit anything resembling entertainment, the culprits are the same people who tanked two film series based on Spider-Man and who have consistently ruined cinematic opportunities for the depiction of other characters in the web-slinger’s world: Sony Pictures. Everything about this film feels like it was dredged up by the same creatively bankrupt executives who made it necessary for the WGA and SAG-AFTRA to go on strike last year and it’s yet another disappointing superhero film that Sony can lose money on. 

In 2003, Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson) suffers a nearly fatal accident while working as an FDNY paramedic and begins to have visions of the near future. In these visions, a mysterious man with the ability to climb walls, poison victims and who has enhanced strength and dexterity is trying to kill three teenage girls. Unwilling to let them die, Cassandra tracks down the girls, Julia Cornwall, Anya Corazon and Mattie Franklin (Sydney Sweeny, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Conner), and tries to help them survive while their assailant, Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), uses all of his resources to try and kill them. 

Writing this plot summary was extremely tough because, to be honest, it was phenomenally difficult to even remember what this film was about. This is one of those films where everything was done wrong in a series that I didn’t think could sink any lower. “Madame Web” is the fourth entry in a new series of films Sony has produced centered around characters from Spider-Man comic books, which the studio owns the rights to, with the other three being “Venom”, “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” and “Morbius”. While Sony has found some recent success with Spider-Man whether it’s through lending the character to Disney to be played by Tom Holland in Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe or having their animation studio produce the amazing “Into The Spider-Verse” and “Across The Spider-Verse”, this particular series has felt lifeless from the very beginning. 

Despite a talented cast, with names like Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney and Tahar Rahim, you would never know that they’ve given critically acclaimed performances based on their work in this film. Every single actor feels completely directionless and their lines are delivered with as much passion as when Gene Wilder half-heartedly told the naughty children to not do something in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” knowing full well that they would do it anyway and get their comeuppance. Johnson and Rahim get the worst of it because so many of their lines are pompously written with the self-importance of a third-grader dressed up as Batman for Halloween trying to give himself cool dialogue to say based on those inspiring speech Michael Caine delivered as Alfred in Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy. 

So many of the film’s problems arise from the script which was written by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, the same people who wrote “Dracula Untold”, “Gods of Egypt” and “Morbius”. I think that if you write a comic book film that is so universally despised that the entire internet collectively came together to turn it into a joke, you should be banished from touching any big-budget Hollywood film. Bare minimum, you should have to write three critically acclaimed indie films before you even come near a production with a budget of over $10 million. I can’t be angry with anyone else since, without a good script, what can you do? While “Madame Web” is her first feature-length film as a director, S.J. Clarkson has had a long and respectable career in television with work on “Succession”, “Dexter” and “Orange is the New Black”. Sadly, none of her talent shines in this film. 

Watching the credits was like reading a list of the dead on a Civil War monument because I know that so many of the people that worked on this film are talented. Leigh Folsom Boyd has been the editor of excellent films like “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and “Furious 7” but this two-hour film felt like eons. Cinematographer Mauro Fiore also worked as the Director of Photography on “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and has also shot “A Good Person” and the remake of “The Magnificent Seven”. However, his camera work is trying to be twisted and crazy but comes off as a diet-version of Sam Raimi’s direction from the original “Spider-Man” trilogy. But no matter how many excellent people you hire, it all comes back to a famous quote by Alfred Hitchcock “to make a great film you need three things: the script, the script and the script.” 

The film’s problems may be many and the screenplay is horrendously written but the contributions of Sazama and Sharpless are merely the Darth Vader of this empire of darkness that has loomed over these adaptations of Marvel Comics. The Emperor Palpatine of this scenario is Sony. Their “guidance” has continuously shown that they don’t care about these characters and just want to make a big cinematic universe without any of the effort. Their needless meddling has already damaged films like “Spider-Man 3” and “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” but now they’ve decided to cripple a franchise from the very beginning. 

To put into perspective how unpleasant watching “Madame Web” was, I spent the first half of the film dumbfounded by the lack of intelligence on display and the second half was spent fantasizing about other Spider-Man related spin-off films that I’d rather be watching. I, for one, would rather see a feature-length animated film centered on Spider-Ham (famously voiced by John Mulaney in “Into The Spider-Verse”) where all of the anthropomorphic animals are photorealistic and generated with the horrifying “uncanny valley” effects that plagued “Cats”. Would it be bad? Yes but at least it would be memorable compared to the sheer boredom I felt watching “Madame Web”.

I know the term “superhero fatigue” is getting thrown around quite a bit and there is a reason why. I feel that audiences are starting to think that the superhero film genre is becoming stale and that the incessant number of films is weighing on them. However, other franchises are still trying to inject something fresh into their entries and I still can say that I’m enjoying the genre. I can’t wait to watch “Deadpool & Wolverine” and “Joker: Folie à Deux” later this year and I look forward to future films from the MCU, the DCU and other comic book series like “The Batman Part II” and “Spider-Man: Beyond The Spider-Verse”. But this particular series also has multiple installments being released this year, “Kraven The Hunter” and “Venom 3”, and I only hope that they are better than what I just saw even though I know it’s a fool’s hope.