While Madame Web is a certifiably bad movie, there’s part of me that kinda sorta liked parts of it. Certainly not the editing, choppy action, lack of motivation, blundering dialog, and the sense the whole thing should have been act 1 of a much more entertaining film. But there’s a kind of an off-kilter humor and campiness that results from a genuine effort at a pure comic book film.
The flick stars Dakota Johnson as an EMT who suddenly gets visions of the future. She haphazardly decides to intervene and save three clueless teen girls from… well… from Evil Spiderman. Because this is Sony trying hard to make something of the B and C tier Spiderman-adjacent characters they are holding onto desperately.
Where do you even start with how many things this film does wrong? For one thing, Johnson’s character doesn’t really have much of a motivation, at least for the first half of the film… and, even after a certain point, still not a whole lot. She just… does things… because: script. She has no connection to the three teenagers so most of the movie feels like something she could just shrug and walk away from.
The villain is an exposition machine for which we know two things… he’s very rude to his employee and he (as he recites on numerous occasions) wants to prevent his own murder. Because he’s Evil Spiderman hopped up on a not-very-helpful version of Spider Sense. No other details are asked for or provided.
The teen girls are… plot devices, I guess? They repeat their backstories a couple times and kind of have personalities but mostly they exist for Dakota Johnson to rescue and/or abandon when the plot says its time to investigate her sudden powers. They don’t know what’s going, Dakota Johnson doesn’t know what’s going on, nobody knows what’s going on besides Evil Spiderman and he’s only talking to the audience.
The dialog is hilariously bad, repetitive, and 79.6% exposition, including the kind of information the characters shouldn’t know. The humor is forced adorkable… but Johnson sometimes kind of makes it work.
The camera and editing are swoopy, spinny, rapid cut nonsense that made me think of Halley Berry’s Catwoman. But since that’s a level of slander that no film deserves, I’ll pull it back and just call the editing chaotic. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes the camera just spins around for no reason. It’s distracting and annoying.
The whole thing feels like a prequel to a far more fun flick, no doubt based on a long running superhero team that most people haven’t heard of. But I kind of liked how it lets its geek flag fly… total fan service in an amusingly awkward but kinda fun way. It’s trying to set up a whole franchise of heroes using these characters and its almost charming how much misplaced confidence it has.
I want to give the film 2.5 stars which is my “It’s a mess, but I kind of liked something about it” but I can’t. It’s too poorly made with a plot that has no gravitas, characters who only exist to serve it, and dialog so bad you might just have to laugh. But it’s earnest and has a late stage camp value that kind of saves bits of it, at least compared to how bad the first act was. I just can’t get past the bad to give it a charity bump.
Score: 67