How did we get here? How did this happen? Is there not a just God at play here? Are the tribulations of the mortal coil not taxing, not trying enough? What right does Sony have coming into our lives and delivering upon us a sin most foul?

I don’t even know where to begin with this thing. If I may speak plainly, this is not just the worst film the Sony branch of Marvel has released thus far, this is one of the worst films I’ve seen come out of a major studio, bar none. It is a testament to Sony’s inability or their unwillingness to try to create compelling cinema. This was, at the end of the day, a box to check in order to maintain the rights to a collection of characters in the Spider-Man mythos NOT named Spider-Man. If you thought 2022’s Morbius was the lowest Sony could go, well buckle the f*ck up, because you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Madame Web is the origin story of Cassie Web, a paramedic who begins to experience premonitions of the future after an accident. She begins to realize that these glimpses of the future are somehow linked to her past involving mythical spider-people. This eventually causes Cassie to become entangled in the plot of Ezekial, a man imbued with spider-like abilities who targets three young girls under the pretense that one day they will gain powers of their own and kill him. Cassie must use her newfound powers to protect the girls and discover the mysteries of her past, and I think my IQ dropped a few points just recapping this film. 

This movie is so contrived, so poorly composed and so embarrassingly executed to the point where it borders on parody. The story grows increasingly dumb as more plot points begin to unfold, the characters range from unlikable to underdeveloped, and the technicals are often headache-inducing. It’s never thrilling, never riveting, never interesting, yet almost always unintentionally funny. I’d almost recommend it because it truly must be seen to be believed, but I cannot in good faith tell you to spend your hard earned money on a ticket. Let’s get to the bottom of this trash heap, shall we?

Dakota Johnson has been on quite the press tour for this film, where she has made it clear she does not care and does not take this film seriously. And honestly, who can really blame her? Her performance as Cassie Web is unequivocally bad, managing to be both unlikable and uninteresting. People tend to hate on Johnson a lot, but I do think she can be a good actor with the right role. Just by watching her interviews you can tell she’s a bit out there, and having a character closer to her mentality can lead to success. Just look at her roles in films like Suspiria, The Lost Daughter and Cha Cha Real Smooth. These roles have a bit of roughness to them which really works for Johnson, and frankly she’s just miscast here. The character of Web is meant to be a bit awkward, but the combination of Johnson’s performance, the directing and the horrendous writing take her from being quirky to mostly off putting and unlikable. Her journey as a character is not rewarding or interesting in the slightest, and every moment spent with her is either making you laugh at the sheer absurdity of her dilemna or annoying you beyond belief. Whether she’s speaking out loud while alone to shovel her thoughts and exposition down your throat to belting out some of the laziest early 2000s super hero dialogue, Cassandra Web is right up there with Michael Morbius as one of the worst Marvel protagonists to grace the screen. 

The supporting cast isn’t too much better. Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor are all given flat, surface level characters devoid of any real personality, tied together by more or less the same kind of backstory. They suffer from the same issues as Johnson, being fed terrible lines while being severely under-directed. It really does feel like these actors are embarrassed to say these lines, not wasting the time and effort to make these characters more realized if the script isn’t going to try either. Perhaps the most egregious thing about these characters is how trailers and earlier moments in the film tease their eventual transformation into super heroes, because you know, this is supposed to be a superhero movie. But low and behold, in a move as obvious as death and taxes, the girls only appear in costume for about 2 minutes. A shame too, because the designs look pretty damn faithful to the comics, but the film seems dead set on wiping away what made the world of Spider-Man so enjoyable to begin with.

There’s next to none from the Spider-Women here, but we do get a little bit of a Spider-Man…kinda. Tahar Rahim portrays Ezekial Sims, a character known as more of a mentor to Peter Parker in the comics, but here he’s a full blown villain complete with his own spider-suit. Ezekiel has to be the most baffling character in this entire thing on multiple levels. His motivation is incredibly vague, while his reasoning for wanting to kill the three girls is because he saw them kill him in his dreams. And you know, it’s never stated or fully hinted that Ezekial possesses the gift of premonition that Cassie has, so it really makes the setup look incredibly dumb. Hell, the way he’s able to even find these girls in a big place like New York City is through secret NSA technology that he claims to have stolen, which allows him to not only access every camera and phone in the city a’la The Dark Knight, but it can also create stunning, de-aged, one for one replicas of the girl’s faces just from his own description. These characters aren’t linked together, not like the tagline of the film might have you believe, so they had to think of a way for it to be possible for him to even enact his plan, and they decided on Macguffin.exe. But that’s not the only insane thing about his character; pretty much all of his lines have been dubbed over…poorly. Like, I’m pretty sure it’s still his voice, but the lines he’s speaking feel noticeably distant from how his mouth moves. And I’m not kidding, nearly every single line Ezekial says in the movie is ADR’d. Did they just lose all of his audio, or was he trying a funny accent that they decided didn’t work in post? We may never know, but it really transforms this otherwise okay performance into a laughably bad antagonist.

The biggest villain of this film is actually not Ezekial, but the downright first draft-tier script. The dialogue feels so inhuman and so unaware of itself. Characters will constantly talk out loud while alone in order to explain how they’re feeling to the audience or downright explain what just happened in a scene because I guess this was made for an audience of lobotomized children. The attempts at comedy are incredibly dull, with the only laughs I had during all of this coming from how unintentionally hilarious some of these lines and deliveries are. Sometimes it really feels like they did one take and just kept moving no matter how bad the scene was. The story itself is both incredibly run of the mill and structurally unsound, relying on story conveniences and obvious as hell revelations. This all culminates into an absolutely horrendous ending, which, yeah we’ll talk about that trainwreck in a bit. The timeframe of this film also feels all over the place. I had heard it was supposed to take place in the 90s but then it seemed to be pivoted towards 2003, but then there’s a ton of elements that just make this feel like modern day. Brittney Spears’ Toxic is heard on the radio as an up and coming track but there’s a guy playing a PSP on the subway which didn’t come out until 2005; it’s just so poorly defined.There’s no real frame of reference to discern how this fits into a greater universe. Is it connected to Morbius? The MCU? Spider-Man at all? It’s all so poorly defined because I don’t even think the filmmakers knew, considering it seems like they lied to get some of these actresses to even sign on. The connections to anything Spider-Man related is loose to say the least. Cassie Web’s powers are tied to an ancient race of spider-people in the Amazon that tried to save her mother, who was mortally wounded by Ezekial when she was about to give birth. She receives all the powers a spider has, like seeing into the future, astral projection…CPR certification. This just doesn’t seem to play into any real part of the Spider-Man lore and could have just tried to have been its own thing, but it still tries to nestle itself into that lore by including certain characters. Pre-Uncle Uncle Ben is here, and yeah there’s jokes about him getting shot because of course. Peter Parker is actually born in this movie, but more as a reminder of what kind of mythology this film sits in rather than anything substantial. It’s a reminder that Sony has no clue what kind of world they are trying to build or where they go from each film, hoping just one of these half-baked pieces of media rakes in enough money so they can continue to hold an iron grasp on the Spider-Man IP to make more shitty movies with. Grade A gameplan my guys.

Visually I think this film occasionally but rarely shows some promise. There are sequences where Cassie is experiencing the same instance over and over again, and I think a decent job was done making these moments disorientating. Unfortunately, that disorientation bleeds into the rest of the film through unappealing visual effects and jarring camerawork that either makes scenes a headache to watch or just ignore the rules of scene structure. They sure did try to get creative with some shots, but my God, the editing of these scenes can be straight unbearable at times. Erratic, frequent cuts are leaned upon to imply tension but it just makes it seem like the film thinks you have the attention span of a squirrel and has to keep things cutting to keep you from falling asleep. This, combined with the aforementioned ADR problems that extend to the other characters as well, just makes this feel cobbled together by a bunch of different ideas and directions to the point of being nonsensical.

And then there’s the ending. The coup de grace of this whole dumpster fire. I’m going to be spoiling this so if you really care, click away now, but come on, it’s Madame Web. So Cassie, the three girls and Ezekial convene at what I can only assume is the explosives factory where the women set off a bunch of fireworks to hopefully slow him down so they can escape. They make it to the roof where a rescue chopper tries and fails to pick them up. Ezekiel confronts them and fights them next to a giant Pepsi sign on the roof, which by the way, there’s just a shit ton of Pepsi product placement here, almost as much as Sony products. And here is where Web and Ezekial finally face off, where Web shows off her new ability that allows her to astral project herself to multiple different places on the roof in order to save all 3 girls, which is just so boring. It’s not exactly satisfying or completes any kind of character arc. The three girls, whose future as Spider-Women is alluded to countless times, don’t do anything to beat the man that has been trying to kill them. In my opinion, this should have been a moment where Web somehow imbues the spider-powers into the three girls so they can fight Ezekiel. This way, the girls would have autonomy over defeating their stalker, while also tying into Ezekiel’s whole conflict. His paranoia made him seek these girls out and inadvertently brought them into contact with Cassandra, so really if he never would have sought them out, then he wouldn’t have created the superhumans that eventually defeat him. But no, this is actually how he dies. So early in the film when Cassie nearly drowns and has her first vision of the future, she sees a big neon S. Then when they’re fighting in the climax, she starts to see the big neon S in the Pepsi sign start to wobble. She buys her time, distracting Ezekiel as the sign continues to shake and rattle from all the explosions. Then after enough time, the sign starts to fall down, and you guessed it, the P kills him.

The P in Pepsi kills him.

Was the S included perhaps because…Spider-Man starts with S? 

I’m going to drown myself in the Hudson.

And then there’s one last bit about that ending that urks me. So, after saving the three girls, Cassie falls into the river where I guess she gets hit by a firework in the face? The girls rescue her and perform CPR to save her life. But then as the film is winding down, it’s revealed that Cassie is now both blind and a paraplegic. Now, this is obviously reflective of how Madame Web is portrayed in the comics, as someone whose physical body has failed them but still manages to do good with the powers she possesses. She succeeds despite her disability, and this kind of character could have been way more enticing to follow. Instead, we get a neurotic, unsociable, emotionally distant paramedic who “earns” her blindness and wheelchair like it’s the goddamn Iron Man suit.

F*ck you, Sony. 

How did we get here? How did Sony manage to top what most people already considered one of the worst superhero movies of all time a little more than a year later? I really don’t know, and as easy as it could be to point the finger at the director, the writers, the actors, at the end of the day Sony is the one greenlighting and overseeing these productions. It’s very possible that Sony could be studio-noting and strong-arming directors away from their intended vision to reach a final product that they see fit. Sony is the one that approves and releases everything, and if they aren’t putting in the work and foresight to make sure this turns out good, then that’s on them. And this is the reaping part that comes with the sowing.

If I can walk away from this film with a silver lining, I can at least say I had a good time watching it. It is genuinely baffling to see a big name studio release such an untested and poorly thought-out film, but it makes for a great watch with friends. I genuinely think you’ll laugh a lot here, especially if you too are tired of modern superhero movies, because it will feel like a parody. I can’t say with good conscience that you should go and pay to see this movie, because Sony does not deserve it for this, but if you can find “other” ways to view it, then by all means. It has been a solid minute since I’ve found a film to be this so-bad-it’s-good, but low and behold, Madame Web manages to succeed at something.

Rating

Web of Fate

Like I’ve said multiple times on this channel, if you’re going to be watching a movie this bad, you may as well have a drink in hand. The Web of Fate is a dessert martini of sorts that’s and amalgamation of sweet fruit flavors like raspberry and cranberry, alongside richer dessert notes of chocolate and cinnamon. You’ll find this to be much lighter than your average dessert cocktail, yet it doesn’t skip on the sweet and tart flavors you’ve come to expect. To top it all off; you can get creative with a marshmallow spider web! That’s right, Halloween is coming a bit early with this garnish, which will go right along with this film’s downright frightening Rotten Tomatoes score.

Ingredients

• 1.5oz vodka
• 3/4oz raspberry liqueur (I used Chambord)
• 1/2oz amaretto
• 1/4oz creme de cacao
• 1oz cranberry juice
• 1/4oz cinnamon simple syrup
• Garnish: Marshmallow web (1 medium to large marshmallow)

Instructions

1. Combine all ingredients into a mixing glass and stir with ice to chill.
2. Strain into a chilled martini glass.
3. For the web, place a marshmallow on a microwave-safe plate and microwave for about 20 seconds. The marshmallow should balloon in size, which is your sign to take it out.
4. Wait for it to cool a bit, then use your hands to spread the marshmallow across the rim of the drink to make a spider web design.