Full spoilers for this immediately. I’m not stepping around this. Nobody saw it except for me and my friend Jackson. I’ve been watching superhero movies since I was a little kid and I’ve been waiting for a movie this bad in a funny way. Morbius failed because it was just so boring, but this exceeds in every single respect. Every decision made is baffling. Anyway, let’s get into it.

Madame Web stars Dakota Johnson, Adam Scott, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor, Tahar Rahim, and Emma Roberts. Allegedly it was directed by S.J. Clarkson and written by Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, Claire Parker, S.J. Clarkson, and Karen Samga. We could blame all of this on the writers, but this movie was clearly butchered and torn apart and edited to pieces by Sony executives and people who have no idea how to make a movie. Although Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless wrote Morbius, Power Rangers, Dracula: Untold, The Last Witch Hunter, and Gods of Egypt. If you haven’t heard of any of those, it’s because they’re all universally considered by moviegoers to be either terrible or mediocre, and they all failed at the box office. I’ve only seen Morbius, which is not a promising representation of their talents. So if you also need someone to blame, we’re focusing it at the Sony executives and these two idiots. Let’s get into it, yeah?

How Did We Get Here?
So typically I follow a fairly standard format of these reviews and I break down each of the character arcs and the cinematography and all the elements that went in to making this movie what it is. But I think it’s appropriate and in-keeping with this weird shambles to just throw all that out and wing it. Also this one might be a little long. I’ve got lots to say. And if you don’t know what this movie is, congratulations. In the comics there are a few different characters who go by Madame Web and can use weird clairvoyant powers to tell people when danger is on the way. She’s also an easy catalyst for any and all of the Spider-Verse comics they’ve published because her powers are so ill-defined you can say “And also multiverse stuff.” There’s a never-ending sea of spider-characters with slightly different powers and names that often they get treated as interchangeable. Like in this, for instance. So Sony Pictures’ Spider-Man division, a notoriously incompetent group of people, looked at the lack of critical acclaim and zero box office success that Venom and Morbius were garnering and thought “Let’s take four different female Spider-Man characters that almost never interact in the comics and put them in a low-budget horror movie.”
They then tricked the four leads into starring in this bad movie (Who all thought they were in a real MCU movie and not a Sony/Marvel custody battle.) and tried to connect it to the Andrew Garfield universe and set it in a completely different era with a story based around multiverses and tying all the Spider-Verses together. Disney said no to all of that and it was reshot and half the plot changed and they moved the setting of the movie up by ten years. And now Dakota Johnson is out doing press for this and telling everyone she hated making it. That’s everything I knew going in. I knew this movie would be terribly written and weirdly edited and have bad CGI, and boy did it. But did my friend Jackson and I have an excellent time? Hell yes we did.
Quick interlude. I’m always trying to work on myself and be better as a human being and one big struggle I have is not being a massive dick about other people’s opinions on superhero movies. And I’ll tell you right now, I really enjoyed this for all the wrong reasons, but if someone came up to me on the street and said “My favorite MCU movie is Madame Web, it was really well-written, the effects were incredible, the acting was first-class and I enjoyed it a lot” I would have to try really hard not to tell them what an ignorant and patently incorrect fucking opinion that is. For instance, it’s not an MCU movie. Yes, that makes me sound like a permanently online psychopath who can’t hold a normal conversation with another human being. But I promise I’m not. Most of the time. So now that you know how we got here, let’s break down the plot.

An In-Depth Plot Breakdown and Gleeful Review
Constance Webb, heavily pregnant vague explorer, is searching for a vaguely mystical spider (That can heal you but also give you insane powers) in the Peruvian Amazon with a clearly sinister man named Ezekiel Sims. They have an exposition-filled argument about ethics or some bullshit and then he sneaks into her tent to look at her secret drawings of spiders. When Constance walks back into the awful fake looking green screen/set with the spider she’s been looking for now contained in a jar, Ezekiel shoots all the other explorers with laughably fake-sounding bullets that leave zero blood. He also shoots Constance and runs away with her spider. But before she can die, some native Peruvian tribal members (That Constance just swore were a myth!!!) jump through the trees, grab her, and bring her to a mystical cave with a pool. Right before she dies, a different spider bites her and she gives birth, and one of the Peruvians promises that one day the baby will come back to Peru and he will tell her the answers about who she is. Alright, man.
Flash forward a bunch of years to 2003, and Cassandra Webb has grown from abandoned cave baby into New York’s most unlikable and socially unaware EMT. We know she doesn’t like most other people because she tells Adam Scott this multiple times, but also because after they rescue a woman and get her to the hospital, the woman’s son tries to thank her and give her a drawing of his family, and she says “What am I supposed to do with this?” in front of him. And yes, it is impossible to tell scene to scene whether this is the character Cassandra Webb being disinterested and irritated, or the actress Dakota Johnson wishing she’d done another 50 Shades of Grey instead.
Throughout Cassie’s day we’re introduced to three different teenage girls that are all obviously women in their mid-20’s. Are they important to the story, you’re wondering? No, but they are main characters in this. And then we get one more indication that Cassandra Webb, former foster child, doesn’t have lots of friends. A cat wanders into her window and she feeds him and says “Us strays have to stick together.” Wonderful.
That night, Ezekiel Sims goes to an opera and silently seduces a woman in the most awkward and emotionless one-night stand sequence ever committed to film. Once they’re in bed, Ezekiel, who is now rich and lives in a penthouse, repeatedly tells this woman that he crawled (Like a spider!) himself up to the top from the very bottom and will not let anyone take that from him. He then reveals to this stranger that the spider he stole gave him premonitions and every single night he dreams that in his future, three young women in various Spider-centric costumes break into his penthouse and murder him. In this sequence we see Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor), Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced), and Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), the three girls that Cassie randomly encountered earlier. Ezekiel tells the woman he slept with that he knows they’ll come to kill him one day, and rather than move or become a better person, he wants to figure out where these killers are and kill them first. The woman asks “Wouldn’t they be teenagers now?” or something like that, not at all phased by this incredibly weird conversation. And he says that yes, he knows they would be, and wants to track them down using advanced technology that only someone from the NSA, like this random woman, would have access to, and uses a paralytic venom in his hands(?) to force her into giving him her password. He then makes his employee find these girls so he can kill them. She’s not cool with it, but works for him anyway.
Meanwhile Cassandra Webb is having a hard time. While trying to rescue someone from a falling car, she gets trapped inside and falls into the water and dies. The way in which it happens, I imagine, is not EMT standard code. I’m not sure you’re encouraged to step fully within a vehicle that’s actively tipping off a bridge and stay there while your partner removes the victim. But I digress. Cassie dies, and finds herself in a terrible CGI realm of weird wispy metaphysical webs and windows into the future. At this point, I was already enjoying myself, but this really tipped me over the edge (Heh) and I was laughing pretty much from now to the end. Also, I’ve only talked about the first thirty minutes so far, but that’s when all the plot happens, then barely anything happens for a while. Cassie snaps out of her realm and wakes up. Ben tells her she was dead but now she’s back and her vitals are abnormal and she should go to the hospital but she assures him she’s fine and then Ben tells her her vitals are abnormal and she should go to the hospital but she assures him she’s fine and- oh no! She’s reliving the same moments multiple times but also seeing into the future and slipping and sliding across her own timeline.
She goes to Ben’s sister’s baby shower and insists to him that she’s okay to be up and about even though she specifically said she didn’t want to go to this baby shower and could have used her near-death experience as an excuse. When Cassie meets Mary Parker, Mary says “I can feel the baby leaping around! He’s really eager to get out!” What I love about this is not only that it’s a terrible line with zero subtext in a movie with plenty of those, but also that it’s quite possibly the funniest way to tease that she’s about to give birth to Spider-Man. I couldn’t think of a more subtle way to do it, but there’s no subtlety to any of this. And I don’t know much about being pregnant and the mechanics involved, but I’m pretty sure the fetus isn’t just leaping about inside the uterine wall in excitement. And if it is, that’s probably a really bad and dangerous thing. All of Mary’s baby shower games are specifically designed to make Cassie feel uncomfortable like “What do you think of when you think of your mom” or “Guess the baby name” which, by the way, is a terrible game. I’ve never been to a baby shower but just naming names your baby could have is the worst and most boring game that anyone could ever play. There are so many names it could be, you’d be stuck there for hours while Mary’s vapid horrible mom friends get increasingly drunker and throw out obvious jokes like “Reginald”. This is the one time I sympathized with Cassie.
Cassie ends up predicting that one of her coworkers is about to die but doesn’t stop it and eventually she ends up on a train with those three girls and Ezekiel as he tries to kill them. But she predicts that he’s about to do it before he can, and ushers them off the train. Somehow the train police think she’s kidnapped these three girls who, we must remember, look like grown women, and she steals a taxi and drives them into the middle of the New York woods, which is the only place Ezekiel couldn’t track them with the NSA technology. Unless these woods are conveniently next to a diner. Cassie leaves the girls there to go back to her apartment and look at her mom’s spider books and realizes the killer knew her mom. The girls bicker for a bit and then leave the woods to go get food at the diner WITH THEIR FIRE STILL BURNING. At this point, Jackson, who worked at a summer camp with me, turned to me to say how unsafe that was. Meanwhile I was hoping the forest would be burned down when Cassie returned. It was not. Cassie finds the girls at the diner as they’re dancing on a table in front of “cute high school guys” who are just there for some reason. Because you know how guys love it when random women hop on their table and just sway from side to side while laughing. Ezekiel shows up and kills all the girls, only for Cassie to travel back ten minutes and hit him with a car before he can kill them. This, admittedly, is a somewhat fun scene set to “Toxic” by Britney Spears, which I then googled to make sure it came out in 2003. It did, and Jansport backpacks were also around then, which I also double checked. This movie weirdly seems to be sponsored by Jansport and Pepsi. More on Pepsi later.
Cassie brings the girls to a hotel, reminds them for the umpteenth time that she didn’t ask for this to happen, doesn’t like them, and tells them she needs to bring them to their parents, but for various reasons, that’s not an option. So Cassie teaches them all CPR in case that will be important later, and drops them off with Ben so she can fly to Peru. She tracks down the tribe of leaping people that rescued her and her mom, and the guy that promised he would tell Cassie the truth brings her to the cave pool she was born in and pushes her astral form in. Imagine when that happens in Doctor Strange, but worse, and also from the second they enter the cave it’s obvious he’s going to push her in. This cave of memories allows her to channel her powers and watch her mom go to the doctor before she died. What follows is, in my opinion, the best scene in the film.
Constance Webb learns from a doctor that though she is pregnant with a daughter, she’s also sick, and her daughter will be born with a motor-neurative disease and be paralyzed her entire life. Constance doesn’t like this news and gets very upset and insists she can reverse this and won’t accept it as an inevitability, and she’s read lots of stuff about those famous Peruvian healing spiders. After this whole monologue, Cassie and the writers throw subtext out the window entirely and spell out exactly what’s going on. “But I don’t have a motor-neurative disease!” Cassie objects. And then she steps into her mother’s past and actually talks to her and interacts with her (Something she can apparently do) and hugs her and says “All my life I thought you hated me and didn’t care about me and went to the Amazon and risked your life while heavily pregnant because you cared about spiders more than me, but you did care about me! You did all of this for me!” I’m paraphrasing and adding bits, but that is more or less 100% the dialogue. Because how could the audience inference that on their own, right? She jumps out of the cave illusion, gets a variation of the great power and responsibility speech from her new friend, and flies back to New York, where the girls have been hiding at Mary’s with Ben for weeks.
They never determine how Ezekiel is tracking them, but clearly the NSA has no cameras in Mary’s house, and it’s only when all of them leave the house together to rush to the hospital (Peter Parker’s about to leap out of his fetus!) that a camera catches sight of one of them and Ezekiel is back on the chase. Cassie tracks them down and steals an ambulance and intercepts their hospital route. Before Ezekiel can kill anybody, they split up. Ben and Mary rush to the hospital and Cassie takes the girls to a highly explosive building to make a final stand against Ezekiel. How do we know it’s highly explosive? Because earlier on, when Cassie, Ben, and other EMTs are doing their job nearby, some guys stop someone from going in there and say “Be careful, that building is highly explosive”. Long story short, Cassie and the girls light flares to try and blow him up and rush to the roof, where a rescue helicopter she called is trying to land. But it can’t because there’s a big Pepsi sign on the roof.
The final showdown consists of a downed helicopter, the three not-yet-spider-girls all hanging precariously from different beams, and Ezekiel touching Cassie a bunch with his paralytic venom hands and insisting she can’t save all three. But she begs to differ, and bursts forth three separate astral projections that rescue them all. He still poses a threat and insists Cassie cannot defeat him. And she can’t, but she can still see the future, which is how she knows he’ll be crushed and defeated by the real hero of the movie, the letter S from the big neon Pepsi sign. Meanwhile one of the P’s sends her into the water. Don’t worry, we’re almost done folks.
The three girls who would be heroes still don’t have their powers, and they won’t get them here. Their hero moment comes from dragging Cassie’s now blind and paralyzed body (Paralyzed by Ezekiel and blinded by a flare hitting her in the water, she finally suffers from ailments the motor-neurative disease threatened and becomes fully comic-accurate, which in a better movie would be an interesting comment on how you can’t change your destiny but can make it work for you. Here it seems cruel and like an afterthought.) out of the water and alternatively using the power of CPR to revive her. Well, two of them do, Sydney Sweeney’s hero moment is standing to the side and yelling “Guys, we gotta save her!”
In the end, the friendless foster child Cassie Webb ends up blind, paralyzed, and stuck in an apartment with a web-shaped window. But thankfully, she now has a family to call her own? A family that, according to yet another crappy montage of the three of them in costume (Julia is wearing Anya’s costume for some reason instead of the one from the comics that was actually hers) will protect the people of New York by being amazing and powerful. And Madame Web will be there too, because she can astral project an even clearer image of herself now. How will they get their powers? We don’t know. Why did they decide to team up and kill Ezekiel? We don’t know and they never will either because he had to be proactive. What was the point of any of this? Why do these characters like each other? Were they all going to get powers separately and then meet through destiny? There wasn’t one, I still don’t believe they do, and the writers don’t know that answer either. The wonderful message of this movie, purposefully or not, is that nothing matters. You can get magically cured by a spider and still end up paralyzed. You can spend every day of your life trying to avoid the death you dream of and die anyway. You can make a bunch of really good superhero movies and put a lot of time and effort into righting the course of your cinematic universe with Deadpool team-ups and Fantastic Four cast announcements and some people will still assume that a piece of trash made by another studio is your movie and never watch your films again. And no matter how many people want to make a good movie, if it’s Sony making a live-action Spider-Man spinoff, it will always be fucking terrible. But for me, this one was terrible in a truly special way.
I think it’s clear at this point I think this is a terrible movie. They couldn’t even decide what year it was set in, as evidenced by the fact that half the soundtrack came out in 1993 and the other half came out in 2003 (Very specific years) and everyone’s wearing vague clothing. But I had so much fun with it, in a way that I haven’t had fun with a superhero movie in a while. This was terrible, but at least it wasn’t boring. Morbius was boring. Black Adam was boring. Shazam! Fury of the Gods, Quantumania, The Flash, and Secret Invasion were all boring and hard to watch. I was riveted and at the edge of my seat to see how exactly the filmmakers would completely misunderstand the source material yet. Every terrible action sequence, every bad shot of CGI, every weird line of dialogue like when Mattie says “Now Ben’s an Uncle, he’ll love it. He gets all the fun and none of the responsibility” and Cassie says “That’s what he thinks”. Oh my God. I loved it. What a great movie.

Things About This Movie That Were Actually Good
– Adam Scott as Ben Parker is a genuinely good piece of casting, mostly because Adam Scott is great in everything. Not to throw shade at anyone else in this movie, everyone is very talented, it’s just that only Adam Scott’s character and performance doesn’t get thoroughly ruined by writing and editing. He was great. There’s nothing in the writing or his performance that makes him feel like any version of Uncle Ben I’ve ever seen or been presented with. But he’s so charming and great that I didn’t notice some of the weird bits of dialogue he’s been given until after the fact. Like:
CASSIE: “What, you’ve finally met someone, Ben? Who is it?”
BEN: [Stares meaningfully but says nothing, even though you’re 90% sure it’s Aunt May]
CASSIE: “That serious, huh?”
or
BEN: “I stay out of Queens because I don’t want to get shot!”
(The movie ends and sixteen or so years go by)
BEN: “Goodbye, Peter! Always remember, with great power comes great responsibility, and if you’re secretly pro-wrestling on the side because your aunt and I are ancient and poor, make sure you don’t get arrogant. And if a criminal runs by you while you’re there, you should stop him, because you never know what might happen. Anyway, I’m off to Queens. I hope I don’t get shot due to your poor decision making skills and become the motivation for a superhero franchise of varying quality!”
PETER: “I love you, Uncle Ben! I’ll sort of listen to you and then stop growing or evolving for 60 years! It’s more interesting if I’m always a loser whose life is falling apart!”
MAY: “Make sure you get wheat for the wheatcakes, dear! It may be the modern day, but we still act like we’re two old fuddy duddies from the 60’s! And if anyone tries to shoot you, Ben, I’ll stand in front of you! I’m an immortal old woman that will never die and no writer will ever kill me for some dumb reason!”
HARRY OSBORN: “Why does my hair look so weird?”
Okay, admittedly most of that was an excellent joke and aggressive attack on current Marvel editorial on my behalf, but this is the general level of subtlety and nuance we’re working with here.
– We never see Richard Parker because he’s always away traveling. This could be a reference to how sometimes in the comics Peter Parker’s parents are revealed to be spies that died. Or it could be that they didn’t want to cast Richard Parker. And if that is the case, why isn’t Mary on mission with him? Being heavily pregnant doesn’t stop women from getting things done, that’s what I learned from this movie.
– During Cassie’s weird premonition on the train, this guy sits down next to her and asks if this train is going where he’s going, and then she snaps out of her vision and the guy sits next to her again and asks her the same question and she says “I don’t know” and he leaves the train. And then when Cassie and the spider-girls leave that train to get away from Ezekiel, they end up on a different train and the guy sees her again and asks if he’s on the right train. So that’s kind of funny?
– At one point Cassie’s trying to understand her powers and says “Spiders can crawl, can I crawl?” and then she tries it but just kind of slumps onto the floor. Again, it’s kind of funny, but the way it’s edited and played kind of takes all the fun and energy out of the joke. It’s the same for most of this movie, you can never really tell when jokes are happening because she plays the deadpan and aloof thing to the point where it’s not obvious if she’s joking or just being a dick.
– “But I don’t have a motor-neurative disease!”
– Towards the end of the movie, Ezekiel chases the webtastic four down the road by leaping awkwardly from car to car, and while Cassie drives the ambulance that’s about to just stop working for plot reasons, she coaches the girls on how to charge up the defibrillator and then they zap him through the roof of the car. I thought that was kind of fun.

So that was my incredibly long and incredibly positive (?) Madame Web review. I hope you enjoyed it. And I hope you see the movie. Everyone should. Stay tuned for more bloggage. And have fun.