As someone who is always clamoring for more female-led big-budget movies, I was really hoping to be a dissenting voice in the ongoing conversation regarding Sony/Marvel’s Madame Web. I definitely admire Dakota Johnson, and I like the idea of a female superhero movie. Even in today’s era of superhero fatigue, there is a chance a deep dive into a less familiar character could prove refreshing somehow. Unfortunately, Madame Web is the movie everyone who didn’t bother to see The Marvels but complained about it online said The Marvels was. This is the kind of absolute disaster I don’t think the superhero genre has seen since maybe Fan4stic (2015), or Halle Berry’s Catwoman. Come along with me as my poor mind attempts to make sense of what went so spectacularly wrong here.

Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson) is a New York City paramedic, and the year is 2003. Her mother died under mysterious circumstances during childbirth while she was researching spiders in Peru. (No, the famous line from the trailer is not in the movie). Cassie experiences a near-death experience that empowers her with these premonitions, visions of the near-immediate future. She encounters villainous Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), who plans to attack and murder three teenage girls (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor), who he predicts will eventually gain superpowers that will allow them to kill him. She takes these young women under her wing and vows to protect them.

Madame Web shows the feature directorial debut of S.J. Clarkson, who has directed a lot of TV leading up to this, and that sets the tone for what we get here. Madame Web feels very made-for-TV, but not like prestige streaming-show TV quality, more like The CW level superhero entertainment. Which is kind of an unfair statement because it’s my understanding those shows eventually got pretty good. My point is, Madame Web looks incredibly cheap, feels poorly realized from a character perspective, and has perhaps the worst screenplay I’ve seen committed to film in quite some time.

However, part of me wonders how much of this is actually Clarkson’s fault. She has a respectable resume of television projects, and it is quite possible that Sony/Marvel hired her to simply be a yes man to their ultimate plan for this movie. A TV director might come in under budget and get the thing made on time, and pose as little of a threat creatively as possible. She probably took every studio note and did exactly what they told her to, and the result here is a baffling exercise in the worst kind of filmmaking. Part of me wants to give Clarkson the benefit of the doubt because I have not seen anything else she has been in complete creative control of. However, it is pretty difficult to excuse the utter banality of this final product.

The plotting in this movie is out of control stupid and it’s really kind of hilarious. The one sequence in Madame Web that kind of works involves Cassie having a vision at Grand Central Station, of the big bad coming after the three teenage girls, and her trying to rescue them. This sequence is kind of tense, and it almost works. That sequence is immediately followed by Cassie stealing multiple city vehicles (a taxicab, an ambulance, etc), police officers setting three AMBER alerts on her, and then Cassie leaving the three girls in the middle of the woods, telling them to just wait there while she goes to do research. She is sent on a mission to Peru, to learn more about her past. But the film never explains how long she is gone for, or how in 2003 New York City (where 9/11 is still in very recent memory) she is able to get out of the country with the feds chasing her. I guess they just forgot? And she is able to get back home just in the nick of time, when the villain starts closing in on our three young ladies. Just writing this description makes me feel like I have genuinely lost my mind and makes me wonder exactly how many brain cells I’ve killed by watching this utterly inane piece of filmmaking.

Dakota Johnson has been trashing this movie on its press tour, and I can see why. She looks like she does not want to be here at all. She seems bored as she delivers the same expository speech over and over again when characters ask her about what’s happening. She’s an actress I do like, who has proven herself to be an interesting performer in recent years, and what’s terrible here is never her fault exactly. She seems to be giving this thing all she’s got, despite everything standing in her way. The chemistry between Sydney Sweeney (delightful in the recent Anyone But You), Isabela Merced (very good in the live action Dora the Explorer movie a few years ago) and Celeste O’Connor is almost non-existent, and these three actresses have very little to do, and very little chemistry with each other. Tahar Rahim is delivering perhaps the worst villain performance I have ever seen.

We have a pretty good supporting cast here, and unfortunately they’re all dressed up with nowhere to go. Adam Scott, Emma Roberts, Mike Epps and Zosia Mamet, among others show up for their paychecks, and nobody seems engaged in the process or interested by what they’re doing. Nobody seems to really be trying here. This film as a whole feels entirely low energy because the cast is sleepwalking throughout it, but considering the material they were given to work with, like, I guess the studio should be happy they showed up to set at all.

The script here is absolutely what kills this movie. There are four credited screenwriters, including the two writers of the much maligned Morbius, and it shows! Not sure why Sony decided to hire them again. The dialogue is clunky, cringe-inducing and painful to listen to. There is some of the most laughable dialogue, some of the worst editing, and some of the craziest line readings, and some of the worst post-production ADR work that I have seen in a big budget studio movie like this. Tahar Rahim, a star of international cinema, never seems like his mouth is saying what you hear the character say. And practically every big movie requires post-production ADR recording to happen. I felt like I was losing my mind watching several scenes in this film where the post-production dubbing was so poorly done, I felt like I was hallucinating.

It also makes me think of the situation involving Warner Bros. and the scrapped Batgirl movie. Fascist wannabe dictator David Zaslav (who claimed in writing that last year’s The Flash was the best superhero film he had ever seen) shelved the movie for a tax write-off, because it was apparently “unreleaseable.” It’s worth pondering how it possibly could have been worse than this. 

So, in conclusion, Madame Web is pretty much an unmitigated disaster.  It does not feel like anyone here is even trying here or particularly wants to be here. Much less, the audience. It’s almost so bafflingly terrible I kind of want to recommend it, just because it isn’t often we see this legendary a trainwreck. This is like, hands-over-your-face, can’t look away because you’re shocked by the dreadfulness in front of you, but also you want to fall asleep midway through because it’s boring as all hell. It might also just be a bleak representation of studio interference in the media that gets funding to be made in our current era. I’m hoping there is a brighter tomorrow for the female led superhero movie, because as it stands right now, it’s looking pretty grim out there.