'Madame Web' Review: Better Than 'Morbius'!

Dakota Johnson's droll, in-on-the-joke star-turn plus a weirdly welcoming stupidity, at least makes this ill-fated Sony not-quite-a-superhero movie a painless good time

Madame Web
116 minutes
rated PG-13
opens in theaters on February 14, 2024, courtesy of Sony Pictures

Directed by S. J. Clarkson
Written by Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, Claire Parker and S.J. Clarkson
Story by Kerem Sanga, Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless
Produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura
Starring - Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O’Connor, Isabela Marced, Tarhar Rahim, Mike Epps, Emma Roberts and Adam Scott
Cinematography by Mauro Fiore
Edited by Leigh Folsom Boyd
Music by Johan Söderqvist
Production companies - Columbia, Marvel and Di Bonaventura Pictures

One of the skewed ironies of the 2010s superhero movie era is that Sony’s Spider-Man spin-offs were greenlit out of a mercenary desire by Sony to craft their own cinematic universe and yet exist as among the most explicitly stand-alone cape flicks of their time. S.J. Clarkson’s Madame Web is a period piece set in 2003 that was supposed to be more closely tied to the Andrew Garfield or Tom Holland Spider-Man franchise until someone realized the math didn’t math. Rather than go the Texas Chainsaw 3-D route of hoping nobody notices or cares about timeline discrepancies, the film hides its broader continuity connections to an almost comical degree. It also has no illusions of pretension, operating as a wantonly silly and openly comic fantasy closer to “The Dead Zone meets The Terminator” than a conventional four-color actioner. It’s also, okay, it’s not “good,” but it’d be an enjoyable romp if tickets still cost $5 on a Saturday afternoon. 

Following a 1973-set prologue in Peru that will remind folks of Blade’s origin, we hop to 2003 with deadpan, walled-off paramedic Cassandra Web (Dakota Johnson), who would rather save lives than live out her own. Following a near-death experience, she ends up with a skewed “I can see the future” ability, which puts her in the path of Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim). Sims A) was in the Amazon with Cassandra's mom when she was researching spiders… right before she died (a line that shockingly is never uttered in the film), and B) has been having nightmares about three costumed Spider-Women who will eventually murder him. Thanks to post-9/11 surveillance technology, which allows him to track down these three young girls, he’s ready to kill them and thus prevent his death. But the evil Spider-Man will have to get past our newly psychic heroine. As Chris Walken might have said in 1983, “The girls... they gonna die... on the train... no time, go!” 

All of this is knowingly stupid, made more so by Rahim giving a uniquely on-the-nose and exposition-filled performance that seems heavily redubbed and shot in a single location between the start of the writers' strike and the beginning of the actors’ strike. However, Johnson gives almost as much of a cast-to-type droll and deadpan comic turn here as Hardy was unhinged and campy in Venom. She has a relaxed, easygoing platonic chemistry with coworker Ben Parker (Adam Scott), and the dialogue has a certain self-awareness. An early sequence during Mary Parker’s (Emma Roberts) baby shower is so funny that it belongs in a better movie. The teens (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor) take a minute to get into the groove, mostly arriving after the first act, but the picture gives them time to bounce off each other and Johnson. Their interplay is more enjoyable than most of the conventional (but mostly coherent) action beats or origin story tropes.  

Madame Web is ironically closer to what we claim to have wanted from our superhero romps. It's openly inclusive, is unapologetically goofy, is aimed at younger kids versus overgrown toddlers, goes all-in on genre appropriation (it flirts with the psychic versus psychic fun of Ally Sheedy’s Fear), has no rigid connections to existing franchises, is under two hours and features human-scale stakes. Madame Web is not explicitly connected to existing Spider-Man movies, but it’s also (for better and worse) not a superhero movie. Its biggest (and genuinely frustrating) flaw is that it’s an origin story for an origin story about how the three teen girls eventually became a team of ass-kicking wall crawlers. Audiences will be rightly annoyed by the teases of a sequel that we will never get. Not unlike Solo or the first Scorpion King, it’s essentially a prequel to the prequel to the movie we all wanted to see. So that’s one frustrating franchise trope that’s still intact.  

It also, like Sony’s other “not quite Spider-Man" movies, invokes a skewed nostalgia for a time when most superhero movies were varying (Daredevil) degrees (Ghost Rider) of lousy (Catwoman) but A) were unique by virtue of their existence and B) weren’t expected to be all-encompassing pop culture events. We’re already “back” to that latter point. Still, it’s a shame Hollywood waited to diversify its superhero line-up until yesterday's kids were just about to age out of superhero movies. The likely commercial failure of this $80 million, PG-13, teen girl-aimed romp will surely be the latest example of “go woke go broke” for the assembly-line YouTube troll industrial complex. However, like the periodically enjoyable The Marvels and the genuinely good Blue Beetle, this could have been a safer commercial proposition in the mid-2010s. Today’s kids, having lived through a Trump presidency and a global pandemic, don’t have the same interest in seeing costumed superheroes metaphorically preventing or avenging the 9/11 attacks on a loop.  

Look, is S.J. Clarkson’s Madame Web a “good” movie? No, not really. It features at least one heavily re-dubbed performance, feels slightly retrofitted to remove broader universe connections, and does that infuriating modern franchise thing where it spends its entire runtime setting up what would have been a far more entertaining and crowd-pleasing movie that we’ll never get because this one is going to bomb. However, as a 108-minute (sans credits and no, there’s no self-trolling credit cookie here) fantasy thriller featuring an in-on-the-joke Dakota Johnson star turn and a game cast of “have done and will do better work” young actresses, it’s enjoyable. It feels like it was shot on real (and multiple) locations, doesn’t play like it was hacked to death and stitched together with duct tape and offers a few gleefully ridiculous plot turns (like a third-act trip to Peru that lasts as long as a bathroom break). That may be a low bar, but at least it’s better than Morbius.