Madame Web (2024) Movie Review and Film Summary

Madame Web Stars Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney and is Directed by S.J. Clarkson

Review: There might be a fun, oddly interesting, “so bad that it’s good” movie with Madame Web, but it’s marred by so many technical errors and misfires that it makes the film hard to take seriously on any level. Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney are a strange pairing for a superhero movie setting up further adventures down the line.

dakota johnson and sydney sweeney in madame web film — Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney star in Madame Web (2024)

Madame Web Review

Madame Web has been getting panned with negative reviews and criticism this week in a way I’ve seen only a handful of times in the last decade or so. It feels similar to the negative press that Morbius got back when that movie was released in 2022, but that movie’s rollout also had a healthy dose of meme content and tongue-in-cheek commentary (to a point where AMC theaters thought it was a good idea to rerelease it and make a hilariously underwhelming $300,000). That feels less prevalent in how Madame Web has been covered in the last few days – it’s as if the entire industry is calling for an overhaul for how these blockbuster films are conceived of and produced.

It’s essentially a consensus at this point that Madame Web is not good – from the uninspired technical work to the postproduction hack job of an edit to a ludicrously underwhelming script. I, personally, feel that Madame Web can only be truly understood if you see it with your own eyes because some of these glaring weaknesses of the film are so ridiculously bad that it’s impossible to imagine them actually being in a movie from a major Hollywood studio. And it’s even funnier coming from Sony because they just went through this exact same conundrum with their last original Sony Spider-Man Universe film that was mentioned earlier.

Forced to confront revelations about her past and the final moments of her mother’s life, paramedic Cassandra Webb (played by Dakota Johnson, who used her press tour to disregard the fact that the movie Madame Web even existed) forges a relationship with three young women destined for powerful futures, as long as they can all survive a deadly present.

Noticeably evident in Madame Web is that the cast almost had to be shooting this film on different schedules. Dakota Johnson is up to her usual under spoken, reserved and oddly tuned performative tropes that feels undeniably miscast in a superhero film. The only moments where she feels like an authentic character here are towards the beginning of the movie as she’s playing an uninterested paramedic with few social skills.

And if one main character that feels out of place isn’t bad enough, Sydney Sweeney seems to be doing an impression of that same exact Dakota Johnson schtick. She begins to feel more likeable as the movie rolls along, but that’s only because the two teenagers beside her are doing much of the heavy lifting. I actually thought Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor were pretty solid here, delivering supporting roles that fall in line similarly to Xochitl Gomez in Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Iman Vellani in The Marvels (although Vellani looms well over all of these mentioned because hers is the most engaging and entertaining by a mile).

Adam Scott’s performance is surface-level at best, and honestly, about 90% of the acting in Madame Web in general feels wooden and stiff. It’s as if the cast was given the script, read through it, and immediately decided to phone it in. In their defense, there’s not very much here to cling on to. To make matters worse, it isn’t even being performed by a cast well suited to headline a superhero film.

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And that’s before getting to Tahar Rahim as the movie’s big bad, Ezekiel Sims (? – they couldn’t even bother to give him an ominous, villain-ish name to remember him by). The ADR job is strong with this one as nearly all of his lines were dubbed over in the editing room. Frankly, it’s so noticeable and distracting that I’d love (and almost need) for one of the crew members to speak out about why that may be. Tahar Rahim is a pretty solid actor – recently holding his own in Napoleon – and this feels like such a waste of his talents.

The set pieces feel derivate and lazy almost entirely throughout Madame Web. Cassandra Webb’s superpower is her ability to see the future moments before they happen, and by the third time I was fooled into thinking that events happening on screen actually weren’t in the present, I had checked out. I found it oddly annoying. There are also plot points here that tease Peter Parker’s imminent birth and a dull diner fight set to the needle drop of Britney Spears’ Toxic – which may have been interesting had it been executed with any creativity or stylistic flares instead of a taxi car plowing through the diner’s front doors.

There might be a fun, oddly interesting, “so bad that it’s good” movie here with Madame Web, but it’s marred by so many technical errors and misfires that it makes the film hard to take seriously on any level. Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney are a strange pairing for a superhero movie setting up further adventures down the line, but they weren’t even given a real shot here. It’s easy to see why the movie was dumped in the middle of February and given little marketing – Sony doesn’t want you to see Madame Web. It’s going to further taint this hodgepodge Spider-Man universe they are so desperately trying to build (Venom stays innocent, though).

Score: 3/10

Genre: Action, Adventure, Science Fiction, Superhero

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