Madame Web (2024)
When I saw Madame Web, I kept wondering if I was was falling asleep and missing something. The plot is incredibly haphazard and has no transitions. It also has no major throughline, the villain is bland, and the dialogue is uninteresting. It’s as if the writers took every superhero trope known to man, tossed them in a blender, and hit “Puree.”
The story starts in Peru in 1973, with a pregnant Constance Webb researching spiders, but unfortunately she’s shot by Ezekiel Sims, the guy who’s supposed to be her bodyguard. Constance is rescued by a tribe of spider people, all of whom speak remarkably good English, and Constance stays alive long enough to give birth to her little girl, who she names Cassandra.
Fast-forward to 2003, when Cassandra is an EMT driving an ambulance. She’s not the nicest person to be around; her friend, Ben Parker tries to include her in social activities, but Cassie just wants to beg off so she can be home with her cat.
Weird stuff starts happening, of course. Cassie finds she can see into the future, and her fate is thrown together with three girls, Julia, Mattie, and Anya. After that, things get completely crazy. Oh, and Ezekiel comes back, determined to murder the three girls because he’s had a vision of being killed by them.
I knew going in that this movie would probably be a stinker, but I tried to keep an open mind. After all, Barbie wasn’t so bad.
Then again, Barbie was mostly fun. Madame Web, meanwhile…
Let’s face it: A superhero movie has to, by definition, stretch our credibility a bit. Madame Web isn’t a superhero movie per se, because we don’t see Cassie or any of her entourage in uniform or doing superhero things until the end when we’re too worn out to care.
In the meantime, it treats us to such improbabilities as Cassie stealing a Yellow Cab that can somehow go off-roading in the New Jersey wilds, and then later Cassie stealing an ambulance. No one bats an eye at either of these counts of Grand Theft Auto, not even cops.
Other than that, the girls do nothing but run from Ezekiel. And fireworks fall from the sky for some reason. Oh, and they go to the hospital while the unnamed Peter Parker’s mother gives birth to an unnamed Peter Parker, just in case we forgot Madam Web is part of the Spider Man universe.
One of the biggest problems with the movie is that even though Cassie and these three girls are supposed to be a group, they don’t really gel because Cassie is constantly leaving them to go do other things. She leaves them in the forest while she goes back to her house for her mom’s journal. She leaves them again to go to Peru to search for answers about herself and her mom. Why couldn’t the girls have gone with Cassie? That would make much more sense, and we would have been able to care about the characters more.
Everyone at my showing seemed to absolutely hate the film. No one laughed at the attempts at humor and people made a beeline for the door as soon as the ending credits started rolling, except for one guy in the back who sat motionless and glowering at the screen. 2024 is getting off to a great start, everyone.
Madame Web is currently in theaters. Rated PG-13.
My grade: D-
Principal Cast: Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor, Tahar Rahim, Mike Epps, Emma Roberts, Adam Scott, Kerry Bishe, Zosia Mamet, Jose Maria Yazpik, Kathy-Ann Hart, Josh Drennan, Yuma Feldman, Miranda Adekoje, Dierdre McCourt, Naheem Garcia, Jill Hennessey
Directed by S.J. Clarkson.
Written by Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, and Claire Parker.