Yes, Madame Web is a mess, but not everything has to be taken so seriously.
“Messy”, “embarrassing” and “bland” are just some of the words you’ll see if you read the critics’ reviews of Sony’s latest Spider-Man-adjacent film Madame Web – and those are some of the nicer opinions.
The film was only released yesterday (Wednesday 14th February), but already, many are writing it off as the worst movie of 2024 for its clunky plot, bizarre setting and awkward dialogue – “the Cats: The Movie of superhero movies”, wrote Rolling Stone.
And yet, when the end credits started to roll, I couldn’t help but think that Madame Web was just a whole lot of fun – even if that fun was completely unintentional.
Madame Web centres on Cassandra ‘Cassie’ Webb (Dakota Johnson), a socially awkward, hugely stylish and entirely entertaining paramedic, who has struggled to form emotional connections with anyone past her co-worker Ben (Adam Scott) and the stray cat that she lets into her apartment, due to her predictably tragic backstory (her mother died while researching spiders in the rainforest, obviously).
Cassie’s life is changed dramatically after she suffers a near-death experience and develops psychic powers, and the film follows the fallout of such abilities after she is thrown together with high-schoolers Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Anya (Isabela Merced) and Mattie (Celeste O’Connor) and is forced to protect them from the spider venom-powered villain Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim), who is trying to kill them.
Set in a strangely ambiguous year in the early 2000s, amid the rise of Britney Spears and, apparently, Blockbuster Video, Madame Web looks back on a time when the world wasn’t so serious about its superhero movies.
Before the MCU delivered sci-fi sleuths with high-grossing blockbuster hits like Iron Man, Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers: Endgame, terrible comic book movies were the superhero norm.
Think back to 1997’s Batman & Robin, 2004’s Catwoman and 2005’s Fantastic Four. They were kitsch, camp, never boring, and didn’t take themselves too seriously.
They were enjoyed by their audiences for merely being two hours of pure entertainment, filled with old-school CGI and a handful of snazzy Halloween costume ideas.
In that way, Madame Web follows suit. It’s the kind of film you’d have switched on in 2003 while babysitting your 10-year-old brother with your best friend – easy enough to follow while you throw popcorn at each other’s faces and cry laughing over embarrassing school antics.
It’s the kind of film that’s playing in the background when you muse over fond childhood memories, wishing you could return to a time when you weren’t so cynical.
And, unlike its recent critically slated predecessors, including Morbius – a tedious mess that somehow attempted to pose itself as a thriller – and Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom – which suffered from a serious lack of journey – Madame Web is never boring.
It’s easy to follow, well-acted (despite its occasional awkwardness) and, at times, is even a bit touching (take the scene when Cassie teaches teenage trio Julia, Anya and Mattie how to perform CPR, for example).
Littered with regular, if borderline accidental, humour, Madame Web also proved how much of a comedic genius Dakota Johnson really is – not that we didn’t know that already.
From lying about loving limes when she was actually allergic to them (or was she?) to delivering one of the most iconic lines ever heard on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, to confessing that she likes to sleep for 14 hours a night, there are lots of moments in which Johnson lends her much-loved humour to Cassie Webb, with charming consequences.
Obviously, Madame Web has its problems. It would be a complete lie to say it doesn’t.
It suffers from a predictable second half, aggressive product placement, some more-than-cringe-worthy dialogue (specifically during the scene where Cassie has a vision of her deceased mother), and an underdeveloped antagonist (does anyone actually know why he was perpetually barefoot?).
In many ways, it’s bad. In some, it’s worse than that.
Yet, in a climate where Oscar bait is becoming the new normal – think the likes of Oppenheimer and Maestro, for example – and everyone’s top four on Letterboxd are Parasite, American Psycho, Fight Club and Inception, it was always going to be hard for Madame Web to not be ridiculed.
A Sony Spider-Man spin-off starring three powerless 20-something girls running around New York City without Spider-Man? It was doomed from the start.
But, who knows, perhaps in 20 years Madame Web will go down as a cult classic, just as Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer before it. Perhaps it won’t.
Either way, Madame Web managed to return us to a time when we all weren’t so spoiled by our superheroes – a time when we didn’t have to take everything so seriously. And that’s a win. A small win – but it’s a win.
Madame Web is now available to watch in UK cinemas. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to see what’s on tonight.
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