Review | Not even psychic powers could have seen this disaster coming in ‘Madame Web’

Director S. J. Carson swings and misses with the latest Marvel movie starring Dakota Johnson, “Madame Web.” Photo collage by JACK SUNDBLAD, Staff Photographer

Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for “Madame Web.”

There has only been one movie to be so poorly done that I had to walk out of the theaters. But Sony Pictures’ “Madame Web” nearly marked the second.

“Madame Web” follows Dakota Johnson as Cassie Webb (yes, pun intended), an unempathetic paramedic who attempts to save three teenage girls — Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Anya (Isabela Merced) and Mattie (Celeste O’Connor) — from the unimposing villain, simply named Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim).  

Prior to Cassie’s birth, her mother had been conducting research in the Amazon while pregnant. She was in search of a spider with “healing properties” but was shot by Ezekiel. Cassie’s mother is given the venom of this mysterious spider to assist in getting her baby out seemingly unharmed but ultimately dies during childbirth, leaving Cassie an orphan. All of this information is condensed in the trailer by a hilarious run-on sentence that has been ruthlessly memed on the internet — “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.” 

Apparently 30 years pass without Cassie noticing any effects of the spider’s venom coursing through her veins. Once she gains the ability to see into the future, following a near-fatal accident on duty, the audience is left puzzled by the logic and reasoning for her newfound powers. The movie makes little attempt to explain the world’s logic, and the audience suffers because of it. 

Unfortunately, the lack of explanation and illogical reasoning makes up only a small portion of what made this film nearly unwatchable. With a cast full of recognizable names, it’s embarrassing to watch as they perform some of the worst dialogue to ever reach the screen. The line delivery from Johnson and Sweeney is one of the most unbearable aspects, with both performers acting as uncharming and unremarkable as they can possibly be. The lines are clunky and could easily have been better written by a Chapman screenwriting major.

Between the scenes of Webb and the girls, the audience is given glimpses of Ezekiel’s cringey, maniacal laugh and butchered accent. Ezekiel, who has access to the spider’s powers, has the ability to climb walls and, like Cassie, see glimpses of the future. 

Besides having some of the most obscure dialogue in the film, Ezekiel also takes the cake for Worst Marvel Villain, having very poor reasoning behind why he is a bad guy in the first place. He has supposedly seen a future in which Julia, Anya and Mattie grow up to kill him, and decides he must kill them now, as innocent teenage girls, to try and save his future.

When you’re not diverting your eyes from the laughable usage of poor CGI or side-eyeing your friend as the movie digs another plot hole, it’s impossible to not notice the film’s blatant use of dubbing and automated dialogue replacement (ADR). There are moments in the film where the audio will change, a clear cut having been made in the editing process. Other times, the actor’s lips will be shut before they even finish a line. The continuity errors were endless and left me wondering if the editors were editing with their eyes closed.

The film received a pitiful 13% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes and an unsurprising 3.7/10 on IMDb, showing just how objectively bad “Madame Web” really is. The film comes from Sony Pictures, the production company that also released “Morbius” in 2022, which many fans dubbed the worst Marvel movie at the time. After “Madame Web,” opinions may have changed. 

How this movie was approved to go through production and be released in theaters is almost unbelievable. It feels impossible that test groups and employees watched this movie and let it become the disaster that it turned out to be. Did the people who made this movie even enjoy movies?

Despite the sheer terribleness of the film, its one redeeming factor is that it’s so bad I found myself laughing the entire film. The one thing the movie has going for it is that it’s undeniably funny, intentional or not. 

Although it might be fun to watch this movie for a laugh, not even the most diehard Superhero Movie fan can’t defend the atrocity that is “Madame Web.”