'Madame Web' Is the Comedy Event of the Season
If only actual comedies were as uproarious as this misbegotten superhero adventure.
We all knew that Madame Web, the latest entry in the SSU, was gonna be bad. We knew it when Sony announced the movie; we knew it when we saw set photos; we knew it when the trailer was debuted; we knew it when the press circuit became an apology tour; and we definitely knew it when one of the stars fired her agents. I don’t need to tell you this movie sucks - you knew that already.
What you might not know is how hilariously this movie sucks. I can’t remember the last time I laughed this hard. If only actual comedies were as uproarious as this misbegotten superhero adventure. I don’t think you need to rush to a theater to see it, but I’d wholeheartedly recommend viewing it on streaming.
Aesthetically, Madame Web looks like any contemporary generic action movie, but the script seems to have been pulled from that weird era in the early aughts, after the first X-Men movies and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man but before Kevin Feige’s MCU, when the studios smelled blood in the water but still had no clue how to properly attack (see: the 2003 version of Daredevil starring Ben Affleck, the 2005 and 2007 Fantastic Four movies with Jessica Alba and Chris Evans, and the 2004 iteration of The Punisher starring Thomas Jane and John Travolta). Which is to say, Madame Web has the basic shape of a competent narrative, but the moment-to-moment details are monumentally non-sensical and/or idiotically heavy-handed. If it never quite reaches the fever dream levels of ridiculousness achieved by Tom Hardy’s Venom movies, it’s also never as unbearably contemptuous of the audience as Jared Leto’s Morbius.
Loosely based on a thoroughly unimportant side character from Marvel’s Spider-Man comics, Madame Web’s plot is basically The Terminator by way of the Nic Cage vehicle Next: a protagonist with short-term divination abilities must use her powers to help future superheroes evade a villain who hopes to kill them before they grow into formidable opponents. Think that one scene in Minority Report with the balloons and umbrellas, only much dumber.
SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT
As you’re likely aware from the trailers, Madame Web opens in the Amazon in 1973, where a lady named Constance (Kerry Bishé) is studying spiders. She’s eight months pregnant, and while there does eventually turn out to be a reason why she’s in the middle of the jungle when she’s about two seconds from going into labor, I did initially guffaw when I saw her stomach.
With her on this expedition is a security dude named Ezekiel Sims (Tahir Rahim, mostly/maybe? We’ll circle back to this!). I don’t quite know why she needs armed security for what she’s doing but whatever. His real reason for being there is that Constance is searching for a rare spider that is said to grant people superpowers, and he’s gonna steal it once she finds it. Which he does, after shooting her.
This was the moment I knew I was gonna love this garbage: it’s a PG-13 superhero movie and it opens with a pregnant woman getting shot. Incredible. Just incredible.
Luckily for Constance, this part of the jungle is inhabited by people in distinctly Spider-Man-esque costumes with distinctly Spider-Man-esque abilities, and they whisk her away to their finest local medical facility: a subterranean lake in the middle of a dark cave. There, they have one of the magic spiders bite Constance in an effort to save her and her baby. Alas, only the baby, Cassandra, lives.
So the spider-people raise Cassandra as one of their own. Just kidding. They put her ass on a plane back to America to enter the foster system.
Cut ahead to 2003, and Cassandra, now played by Dakota Johnson, is a paramedic in Queens. I’ve seen a lot of critics say Johnson shines despite the shitty quality of the movie, and I can only assume these critics were bribed to be kind by Johnson’s publicist. Johnson plays Cassandra with all the verve of someone who has just awoken from an inpatient procedure. In her first scene, she’s racing an ambulance to the hospital with someone dying in the back, and all of her dialogue indicates that she’s supposed to be understandably stressed, but she delivers it all in monotone murmurs.
This is especially notable because Cassandra’s best friend and fellow paramedic, Ben Parker, is played by Adam Scott, a terrifically talented actor who actually showed up and did his job. So they’re screaming back and forth to one another while he’s trying to keep this patient alive, only he’s screaming and she’s basically talking to herself in a manner reminiscent of one trying to recall where they left their keys.
Not-so-incidentally, the moment we learn Ben’s surname, we understand that he’s destined to someday be senselessly murdered so that his nephew can be inspired to become Spider-Man. He also alludes to having just started dating the woman we will come to know as Aunt May, although they never say her name for some reason.
Moving on.
The following day, Cassandra and Ben once again go to work, and this time they have to save a guy stuck in a car that’s half-hanging off a bridge. They do get the guy out in time, but Cassandra gets stuck inside as the car plummets into the water below. While underwater, she has a CGI vision that kinda reminded me of that ‘chronobowl’ thing from The Flash, only with more product placement - because Pepsi, and specifically the famous Pepsi Cola sign in Long Island City, plays a very prominent role in plot of this movie (only in the film the sign is part of a big warehouse, which is not the case in reality).
Cassandra is awoken from the vision after Ben fishes her out of the water and revives her. She was medically dead, he tells her, for three minutes. The conversation that follows is basically something to the effect of this:
And somehow, Ben does not then say something like this:
So Cassandra just goes on about her day like nothing happened, even after she begins having visions of events that are going to occur several minutes in the future. It will only take her four of these visions to finally put two and two together, but only one of her friends dies as a result of her skull density, so no harm no foul I guess.
In fact, the very next day, Ben makes her go to a baby shower for his sister-in-law, Mary (Emma Roberts), who we know will someday die so her son can go live with Ben so Ben can be senselessly murdered so his nephew can be inspired to become Spider-Man (That’s right - after 22 years and eight movies, we FINALLY get to see Spider-Man’s baby shower! AMAZING!!!). And everyone at the shower, including another of Cassandra and Ben’s fellow EMTs (comedian Mike Epps, not allowed to be funny for even a second), treats Cassandra as though nothing interesting has happened to her recently. I think maybe at one point Mike Epps calls it “a bad experience” or “a bad day on the job” or something horrifyingly nonchalant like that.
Cassandra’s contribution to the festivities, meanwhile, is to tell the expectant mother about how her own mom died in childbirth.
The baby shower is disrupted when there’s a big emergency that requires Cassandra, Ben, and Mike Epps to run off and save people. This is when she fails to prevent Mike Epps’ death even though she should definitely understand that her visions aren’t just visions by this point.
Elsewhere, we catch up with our old pal Ezekiel Sims. We learn that he is now very wealthy, and did indeed gain spider-powers from the magic arachnid he murdered a pregnant lady to obtain, and he has recurring nightmares where a trio of Spider-Women murder him. And I do mean murder him: in the visions, he’s not doing something bad and they have to stop him and the end result is his death - they come into his apartment and kick him out a window. Hollywood really just cannot wrap its head around superheroes not being homicidal for some reason. In any case, Ezekiel is now searching for the girls so he can kill them before they obtain their superpowers.
This is a good time to mention that Rahim’s lips are frequently out of sync with his words, as though he’s in a badly-dubbed Godzilla movie (which is why I said Rahim “maybe” plays the role - it’s not clear that we’re actually hearing his voice). Rahim is French, but he has already appeared in numerous English-language movies, including last year’s Napoleon, so I don’t know why all his dialogue had to be re-recorded.
That mystery is almost as intriguing as the fact that, for reasons never explained, Rahim’s character is always barefoot - like, there are multiple scenes of him walking around the streets of New York City with no shoes or socks - save for ONE shot in his penthouse, where he has bright white sneakers on. I assume these were supposed to be framed out of the shot; what I can’t figure out is how it’s possible they didn’t have another, properly-framed take to use.
ANYWAY, Ezekiel carries out his malicious plan by stealing some Patriot Act-related government facial recognition software, the idea being that he has sketches of the girls from his dreams, and he can use the software to locate them (the sketches are shockingly accurate because they’re patently not sketches but photographs).
Ezekiel’s tech minion in this endeavor - who we know is evil because of her heinous taste in tacky blouses - is played by Zosia Mamet, who I assume accepted the role with the specific intention of humiliating her father. It must have been the easiest paycheck she has ever earned, though - she’s seated at a desk in literally every single one of her scenes, and while half her screen time is with Rahim, half of it is alone. Rough day at the office. I wonder how she remembered her staging?
Meanwhile, Mike Epps is still dead, and Cassandra has to take a train to Poughkeepsie for the funeral. And while she’s on the train, she has a vision of this dude, who she does not know yet is Ezekiel Sims, coming on the train and murdering three teenage girls. She thus helps the girls evade Sims. This is also when we learn of Sims’ ability to somehow magically change from his pedestrian clothes into what looks like an Evil Spider-Man costume in the blink of an eye.
In the process, there’s an a whacky mix-up that results in the police believing Cassandra has kidnapped the girls. You would think this would make Cassandra wanna take the young women to the cops immediately, so that they could both explain that they weren’t kidnapped and the cops could protect them from Sims, but instead she takes them and drops them off in the middle of the woods and goes to look for clues about Sims on her own. Somewhere around here, we also learn that all three of the girls have bad or non-existent relationships with their parents, which I think is supposed to bond them with Cassandra and position her to be their new foster mother. But the movie barely takes time to tease that theme out before it’s onto the next bullshit plot point.
The three girls, by the way, are Sydney Sweeney, who we know is a loser because she wears glasses; Isabela Merced, who we know is good at math because she wears a t-shirt that tells us so; and Celeste O’Connor, who we know is good at skateboarding because she has a skateboard. Sweeney, more than any performer in the movie other than Adam Scott, probably comes off the best here, only because her character is so different from any other she has portrayed - like, she clearly has range, y’know? But if you’re worried these young women wouldn’t be sexualized because the film’s director, S.J. Clarkson, is a woman, think again - they’re perpetually outfitted in shrunken tops and knee-high socks.
So. Cassandra, currently wanted by the police for kidnapping, goes to the last place anyone would think to look for her: her apartment. There, she goes through a box of old stuff, which includes her brith certificate, ‘cause I guess Amazonian spider-people who live in caves still issue birth certificates. She finds a picture of Ezekiel and her mom and realizes he’s responsible for her mother’s death. This information isn’t all that helpful, but she goes back to the woods anyway.
But - gasp! - the girls aren’t where she left them. They got hungry and walked to a local roadside diner, where they met some cute boys. When she finds them, they’re dancing on the table to Britney Spears’ “Toxic,” and none of the diner staff or other diner customers seem all that concerned about it.
Cassandra once again narrowly saves the girls from Sims, and once again takes them to a safe place - Mary Parker’s house, where she makes Ben and this poor woman in her third trimester watch them while she flies to Peru in search of more clues about Sims and her mom. Of course, this puts Ben and Mary (and Mary’s unborn child) directly in harm’s path, but fuck them I guess.
So Cassandra flies to Peru, where she meets one of the spider-people and he fills her in on the details, and we learn that Constance wanted the magic spider because Cassandra was going to be born with a rare, potentially fatal biological disorder. So now Cassandra feels better knowing her mommy died trying to save her.
The Peruvian Not-Spider-Man also teaches Cassandra a very important lesson: “When you take on the responsibility, great power will come.” Fans will immediately recognize this as an inversion of Spider-Man’s guiding principle, imparted to him by Ben: “With great power comes great responsibility.” But the inversion makes no goddamn sense whatsoever. What Ben was saying is that if you can stop something bad from happening, you have an obligation to do so; what Peruvian Not-Spider-Man is saying is that if you decide to stop something bad from happening, the power to do so will come to you. But if, say, a guy is about to shoot someone, and you decide to get between the shooter and his intended victim, you will likely not suddenly become bullet proof. So, truly, Peruvian Not-Spider-Man’s advice is worthless.
Cassandra takes her newfound knowledge back to the U.S. Unbeknownst to her, however, Mary Parker has gone into labor, and Ben and the girls are now driving her to the hospital. Mary lives in Queens, so, naturally, Ben takes her to midtown Manhattan. Maybe working at Queens hospitals has given him a low opinion of Queens hospitals?
So Ezekiel and Cassandra find the girls at just about the same time and they go off to do battle while Ben takes Mary to have the baby that will someday be Spider-Man.
Cassandra and the girls decide to make their last stand in the aforementioned fictional warehouse next to the Pepsi Cola sign in LIC. The warehouse is full of crates of explosives, so Cassandra gives each of the girls two flares and tells them to “Put these in as many of the crates as you can,” and somehow, the one who is good at math doesn’t point out that “as many of the crates as you can” is very obviously six crates.
Ezekiel shows up just as the warehouse is exploding, and Cassandra uses her powers to know where she and the girls should or should not stand, thereby enabling her to position Ezekiel to be crushed by the Pepsi sign. In the process, Cassandra loses the use of her eyes and legs, but she doesn’t seem all that bummed about it. She and the three young women are now a team. Roll credits.
Madame Web is currently tanking at the box office, so there likely won’t be a sequel. I suspect the studio knew this before the film was released, because there isn’t a de rigeur post-credits scene teasing a future episode. That’s obviously fine - the world doesn’t need more of this - but the movie is so much less-unbearable the hype suggested it would be, so I feel the need to speak up in its (very mild) defense. Jared Leto only wishes his awful movies were this much fun.