'Madame Web' Is As Silly As It Looks… And That’s Okay

It's probably exactly what you expect.

Dakota Johnson as Cassandra Webb in ‘Madame Web.’ Source: Sony.

Today I’m pleased to share William Bibbiani’s review of Madame Web. William is a film critic and the co-host of The Critically Acclaimed Network. -David

It may be hard for people who grew up in the 21st century to imagine a time when superhero movies didn’t drive the whole entertainment industrial complex. With a few notable exceptions — like Batman, Superman, Zorro — costumed crimefighters rarely starred in a genuinely great movie, or even a particularly profitable one. For about a century superhero fans had to make the most out of underwhelming films like Steel and Judge Dredd, which didn’t capture the magic of the comics or even try to adapt them faithfully.

But Hollywood runs in cycles, and we’re right back where we’ve started. Superhero movies are still popular but they’re no longer sure things at the box office. The proliferation of the genre has made the good new movies less interesting and the bad new movies look even worse.

And then there’s Madame Web, the latest from Sony Pictures’ somewhat desperate attempt to build their own superhero universe based on the Spider-Man characters they own, but which would never have got their own movies if the studio’s IP supply wasn’t limited. The two Venom movies were unexpectedly successful, although they were cheesy and slapdash. Their amusing cast and queer subtext — so overt it barely qualifies as subtext — made them a pleasant change of pace. And of course there’s Morbius, which may be the most mediocre superhero movie of the modern era.

Madame Web fits somewhere in between the Venom and Morbius schools of superhero filmmaking. Set in 2004, this film could very easily have been made in that handful of years where superhero films were going mainstream but nobody had consistently cracked the code yet. It’s modest in scale, inconsistent in execution, and neither entirely serious nor completely camp. It’s more like Madame Web is vaguely amused by its own existence, and it’s just as surprised that it’s on the big screen as we are. 

There’s a lot to enjoy in this unlikely superhero movie, whether you think it’s bad, just okay, or… actually “just okay” is probably where that scale is going to peak with Madame Web.

Dakota Johnson plays Cassandra Webb (get it?), an Emergency Medical Technician who, like Mr. Grisham in the comedy “Rat Race,” was tragically born without a personality. She was also tragically born in the rainforests of Peru, where her mother was researching super spiders before she was betrayed and shot by her guide, Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim). I guess he wanted it more, and by “it” I do mean super spiders.

A mysterious group of superpowered spider-people — that is to say, people with spider powers, not spiders with people powers — manage to save Cassandra using the spider venom, but not her mother. So Cassandra grew up in America, she resents her mother for dying on a spider hunt, and now she drives an ambulance with Ben Parker, the future uncle of your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, played by Adam Scott.

Cassandra’s spider powers kick in after a near-death experience at work, and just like spiders (???) she can see the future. Ezekiel can also see the future, but unlike Cassandra he also has a bunch of other cool powers, like superhuman strength and walking on walls. Ezekiel has a recurring nightmare where he’s murdered by a trio of Spider-Women, and he’s determined to find those women and kill them first.

So then… gosh, there’s a lot of set-up in this movie… Cassandra has a vision of Ezekiel killing three teenagers on a subway, and decides to risk everything to save those kids’  lives. They go to one place, Ezekiel tracks them down. They go to another place, Ezekiel tracks them down. Meanwhile, Cassandra skips off on various sidequests, like Gandalf in The Hobbit, to figure out what’s really happening and how to stop this bad guy once and for all.

Madame Web isn’t trying to re-invent the wheel, and the wheel it does have is wobbly. The whole plot revolves around the idea that Cassandra can change the future once she envisions it. But the first time she tries, she causes the tragedy she was trying to prevent. That tells the audience that she can’t change the future, so which is it, Madame Web? You literally can’t have it both ways. 

Johnson’s performance as Madame Web is whimsically detached, as though her biggest character note was “You don’t really want to be here,” and Johnson understood the feeling. Somehow this lack of investment makes her character funnier, but it’s hard to say exactly how intentional that is. Either way it’s undeniably comical. Whether she’s trying to walk on walls and failing and telling her cat to tell no one, or whether she’s yelling at her wayward teenagers, “Seriously, don’t do dumb things” (spoiler alert: they do), Cassandra seems befuddled and slightly put out that she has to do any of this superhero stuff. Or any stuff at all, really. She says she’d rather be at home watching American Idol and we believe her.

Oh yeah, and those teenagers are played by Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor. They have different personalities, they’re thrown together through unlikely circumstances, and they grow a bit as people, but their job is mostly to be helpless and immature kids whose bad decisions drive the plot forward so that’s all they do. Mission accomplished, for whatever it’s worth.

But also for what it’s worth, this is a film about a relatively minor Spider-Man character and three Spider-Woman who aren’t even Spider-Women yet, and it’s mostly about clairvoyance instead of spider stuff. Maybe we’ve grown so accustomed to taking superhero stories seriously that we’ve forgotten these types of  films are full of nonsense. Madame Web doesn’t apologize for itself with self-effacing meta-humor, and it doesn’t try to pretend that it’s important either. It’s a weird story that plays out in a weird fashion, and although (other) reviews have mostly been unkind, it’s hard to imagine what anyone expected that they didn’t get. This movie calls its shots very early on with a ham-fisted prologue and comically awkward performances, and never suggests for one second that it’s trying to be anything other than an affable romp through superhero wacky town. And again, that’s a minor ambition, but an ambition they were able to achieve.

Come to think of it, certain moments suggest that director S. J. Clarkson (Anatomy of a Scandal) may have been influenced by the short-lived 2003 live-action Birds of Prey series, which took most of its cues from the kitschy Joel Schumacher Batman sequels. That’s pretty appropriate for a movie starring characters who were probably watching that show at the time. When a movie tells you what it is, it’s usually better for everybody if you judge it on those terms. You wouldn’t say Mac ’n’ Cheese is a crappy hamburger. It never pretended to be a hamburger. All that matters is if it’s decent Mac ’n’ Cheese. 

Madame Web is okay Mac ’n’ Cheese, and it’s the kind with fun shapes in it too, because it’s got superheroes on the label. Expect no more and you’ll get no less. If this was about as good as superhero movies ever got (and for a time, that was more or less the case), there’s no way they would have taken over Hollywood. But they don’t all have to be game-changers and they don’t all have to be great. Sometimes a silly premise becomes a silly film, where the best parts are kinda charming and the worst parts are still kinda fun.

Put that in your web and spin it. -William Bibbiani

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• Over on Decoding TV this week, Patrick Klepek and I discussed Fox/Warner/Disney’s new big sports streaming venture, plus the ending of Mr. and Mrs. Smith as well as what we expect from the season finale of True Detective: Night Country.

• On The Filmcast, we discussed the merits of Lisa Frankenstein with BJ Colangelo.

• [PAID ONLY] Over on my personal Patreon, I discussed Slow Horses with @joyonapping, plus give some other life updates. Check it out here.