The Starlight Journal

Sometimes I do this to myself…

My commitment to watching just about everything associated with Spider-Man on film meant that I would be spending my Valentine’s Day at the theater watching Madame Web. Sony’s newest installment in their attempt to create their own shared universe of Spider-Man characters without actually featuring the titular webhead had a tall task ahead of it before release. Films of the likes of Morbius and the Venom series are what came before it in this so-called “universe”, and reception to those movies ranged from “okay at best” to “we’re going to meme this ’til the end of time”. The trailers and marketing did the movie no favors – awkwardly meme-able dialogue, A.I. voiceover TikTok ads, posters that resembled more of a porn parody of Spider-Man than an actual superhero film – the public went into Madame Web expecting disaster, with the studio not helping one bit to help build hype for a movie surrounding a lesser known Spider-Man character to the general moviegoing public.

Like many things in my life, I go back to the Spider-Man animated series of the 1990s. A staple of my childhood and what got me to fall in love with superheroes in the first place, Madame Web was a major recurring character in that series, often appearing to bookend major story arcs as a mentor/word of god figure to Peter Parker. Usually appearing out of nowhere to steer Spidey in whatever direction the story was headed in, Madame Web was a blind, wheelchair-bound elderly woman with magical clairvoyant powers, overseeing the events of the series. When a Madame Web film was announced, I was curious how such a character would be handled in her own solo movie, but with the casting of Dakota Johnson, it was clear Sony was taking this in a different direction than the version of the character I knew from my childhood. The all-seeing old woman became a 30-something paramedic who develops psychic powers, with the rest of the cast filled to the brim with super attractive and talented actors to get people to the theater. It’s a good strategy to be honest. You fill a cast with Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Adam Scott, Emma Roberts, and other talented young actresses, and slap the Spider-Man universe on it? I’ll admit, I was intrigued when the movie was announced. The trailers, revealing the film’s 2000s setting and further story elements, made me realize this would most likely be no different than Sony’s other efforts to launch a Spider-Man-less Spidey universe, but was this movie as bad as people were expecting?

Let me rip the band-aid off now. Yes, this movie isn’t very good. In fact I would say it is flat-out bad. It’s not a terrible movie, in fact I enjoyed it more than Morbius and the first Venom film (a low bar, I know), but structural issues, very little action, and a super weak villain, among other issues, make this another miss for Sony. The movie is set in 2003, and if you told me the script was written that year as well, I’d believe you. Like Morbius and Venom before it, Madame Web is more reminiscent of the lower-quality comic-book films we’d get in the days before the MCU and The Dark Knight Trilogy. Much has been debated on the decline in quality for the MCU over the past few years, but even the worst-offerings Disney and Marvel have brought us post-Endgame feel like Citizen Kane compared to Madame Web.

Madame Web brings Cassie Webb – a paramedic who awakens psychic powers after an accident – together with three teenage girls, as she seeks to protect them from a deadly villain out to kill them, who has a connection to Cassie’s past. A vision of the future has the future Spider-Women: Julia, Anya and Mattie (played by Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O’Connor) pursued by the crazed Ezekiel, who himself has Spider-powers and will stop at nothing to kill the three teenagers and put an end to the cursed future he has foreseen for himself. The movie plays more like a manhunt thriller than a superhero film. There’s very little action to be found, and the biggest setpieces barely contain any superpowers or heroics, as Cassie spends the bulk of the movie unable to use her powers at will, and while Ezekiel has some of the powers associated with Spider-Man, he lacks most of the exciting ones that contribute to entertaining action sequences.

A big problem with the movie is Cassandra Webb herself. Not just how her powers are depicted, but her characterization. She just isn’t likeable at all for a solid 75-80% of this movie’s runtime. Now seeing unlikeable characters become heroes is no new concept. From Doctor Strange to Tony Stark, we’ve seen this done before. The difference is how the development of those characters is handled compared to Cassie’s. We first meet her as a socially awkward and distant EMT, her only friend is Adam Scott’s character, she pushes away every other character we see her interact with, and she just comes off as plain rude. Even after she gains her powers, she doesn’t fully go through the magic character development of being a protective, good-natured hero until a vision (this movie’s favorite plot device!) has her go from throwing away a child’s drawing to doing everything she can to protect these girls almost off-screen. Because of how rushed it feels, I had a hard time buying Cassie’s dedication to making sure of the girl’s survival during the third act, especially since just twenty minutes prior she was still looking for any excuse to leave the three on their own. Her powers also did not translate too well to film. The sudden cuts back to earlier events in the scenes first showcasing Cassie’s abilities to see the future felt jarring and off-putting. There are portions where we see her uncontrolled powers on display multiple times in a single scene, and then there any large chunks of the film where we don’t see them at all. With such an out-there character like Madame Web, I had a hard time getting behind her as the lead. Dakota Johnson did the best she could do with the script, but she had trouble injecting life into a character that desperately needed it.

Although our main antagonist Ezekiel makes Cassie look like the best character ever put to film. From our very first scene, we see him spit poorly dubbed-over lines that may have well just been “Hahaha I’m evil”. The concept of an evil Spider-Man frantically pursuing his targets is intriguing, but there is just zero substance to his character. It’s not even like an over-the-top enjoyable bad, he’s just the worst villain I’ve seen in a comic-book movie in quite some time. His powers are cool, but we rarely see them. He is haunted by visions of the future like Cassie, but he just comes off like the most generic villain there is. The frantic pursuit can build tension, but when he’s fighting a clairvoyant, we just expect them to always escape. Sony has struggled mightily with crafting compelling villains in the Spider-Universe, and Ezekiel might just be the worst. I had to stop myself from laughing multiple times in the theater over some of his dialogue. Easily the worst part of the film,

Having teenagers that would become three different versions of Spider-Woman is a concept I really got behind. I liked the casting choices, and was curious how they’d work off of Madame Web’s powers, and how’d they’d gain their own powers themselves. The three girls are enjoyable together…. when they are able to be, but on their own they are rather one-note and generic. Julia is the glasses-wearing, awkward one, Mattie is the rebellious child of neglectful rich parents, Anya is the blunt smart one. They are all stereotypes straight out of mid-2000s schlock, they all have some sort of parental abandonment problem, and they’re all being hunted by Ezekiel for being the ones that lead to his demise in the future he sees in his visions. And I need to talk about these visions, because they make up a major portion of how the film is structured and my thoughts on it. So real quickly, I need to go into spoiler territory….

***SPOILERS INCOMING***

Okay so the movie has several references to Spider-Man and his various supporting cast peppered throughout, and they all just range from pandering to just making no sense. We find out in the first scene that Adam Scott plays none other than…. Uncle Ben! Not yet Peter Parker’s uncle, this version of the character is Cassie’s paramedic partner and close friend who helps her out throughout the film. Emma Roberts plays Mary Parker, who is pregnant with Peter throughout the movie, and her whole role is essentially just there to be like “Ah! Get it! Her son is going to be Spider-Man!” As the movie takes place in 2003 and its own separate universe from all other Spider-Man based films we’ve had before, they aren’t there to set up further stories or connect Madame Web to say, Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man, it’s just cheap fanservice to get a reaction out of the crowd from those well-versed in Spider-Man stories. And speaking of pandering…

The trailers heavily market that the three teens become Spider-Women. We see shots in the trailer of them in their suits and in action scenes. You’d think that this would mean they would get their powers at some point during the film and fight alongside Cassie in the climax, but NOPE, every single scene of them as Spider-Women are VISIONS! Talk about misleading marketing. The versions of Julia, Mattie and Anya we see during the actual story are the scared teens being hunted so they won’t kill Ezekiel many years in the future. In a movie lacking action to begin with, having their Spidey alter-egos only appear in visions of the future at the very beginning and very end of the movie is just a terrible decision. Madame Web‘s biggest problem is that the coolest parts of the movie are visions of a future that we don’t get to see, and that just about says it all when it comes to this movie. I will never not be baffled and upset with this decision to cast these great actresses and do nothing with their characters for all but 30 seconds of this movie’s near 2-hour runtime. I just don’t get.

***SPOILER-FREE FROM HERE ON OUT***

I thought the decision to set this movie in 2003 could’ve led to some great usage of the setting, as well as some crowd-pleasing 2000s nostalgia. Yet you really could’ve set this in the present day and nothing would’ve changed. Aside from some visual nods or lines of dialogue, there’s nothing here that makes the story feel like it takes place in the early 2000s. I’m a sucker for period-piece comic-book films. I think Captain America: The First Avenger is mad underrated, I love the first Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel I think is unfairly hated on and totally rocks its 90s setting, and I am damn excited for whatever the MCU has in store for The Fantastic 4 next year. I grew up in the 2000s. I’m mad nostalgic for just about anything and everything from the time period this movie is set in, and they give you just about nothing and totally waste the period setting. Here’s what you get signaling that this takes place in 2003: a random shot of a Blockbuster store, a Beyonce poster, a mention of American Idol, and an action scene set to Britney Spears’ “Toxic” (which admittedly is one of the best scenes of the movie to the shock of no one). And that’s about it. Overdoing it with nostalgia for past decades in period piece movies and TV shows can be a tricky subject, as sometimes it has the risk of you dangling nostalgic items in front of your TV screen and going “HEY! REMEMBER THE 80S? THESE WERE THINGS FROM THAT DECADE!” But like, if you’re going to have a movie set in the 2000s, just give us something. Anything!

Again, the movie isn’t all bad. Adam Scott is genuinely great in his scenes as Adam Scott always is. I liked the chemistry the three girls formed throughout the film. There are some cool scenes peppered in at the right moments, and I was invested in how our leading ladies would escape from our underwhelming antagonist. I would take this over Morbius, and hell even most of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 any day. Madame Web isn’t an all-time bad level comic-book film that will go down in infamy at least for me, but it just doesn’t offer much of excitement or new energy for the genre that makes it a simply forgettable, often-boring time at the movies.

The Starlight Film Journal is a passion project of mine I am excited to return to in 2024. Look forward to my Best of 2023 articles coming soon, future film reviews, and my monthly Film Journal articles! If you are interested in more of my thoughts on movies, I journal every film I watch on my Twitter, Instagram and Letterboxd and would love it if you joined the fun!