It’s one of the most famous deals in Hollywood history: in 1999, before they figured out that there really was a market for comic book movies, Marvel signed a deal with Sony to give them the rights to one of their more popular characters, Spider-Man. The really crucial element of the deal was that it would never expire—so long as Sony had a new Spider-Man movie in production within 3 years and nine months of the release of their last Spider-Man movie, and a new movie in theaters at least every 5 years, nine months.
Years later, with their own movies wallowing and the Marvel Cinematic Universe ruling the silver screen, Sony agreed to let Spider-Man cross over to the MCU, but that didn’t stop Sony from continuing to make their own Spider-Man movies (and even including MCU characters in some of them). It also didn’t stop Sony from somewhat desperately trying to create its own cinematic universe around its arguably most valuable piece of intellectual property. And that gave us the fairly decent Venom, along with the forgettable Venom sequel, the decidedly less decent Morphius, and now, Madame Web, which is, regrettably, much more on the Morphius end of the scale.
Madame Web is the origin story for four extremely lesser-known characters in the Spider-Man canon: the titular character and three Spider-Women. The backstories of these characters are, to say the least, complicated, but that doesn’t really work for a two-hour movie, so instead this film mostly focuses on Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson), a relatively inept paramedic in New York City in 2003 who has a near-death experience that leads to the discovery of her super-power: she can, occasionally (i.e., whenever it’s necessary to drive the plot forward), see a few seconds—or sometimes a few minutes—into the future. This eventually leads her to stumble across three young teenage girls (played by 27-year-old Sydney Sweeney, 25-year-old Celeste O’Connor, and 22-year-old Isabella Merced) who are being hunted by Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim).
Sims isn’t exactly the greatest evil mastermind a comic book movie has ever put forth: in the opening sequence, we see him shoot Webb’s very pregnant mother (Kerry Bishé), which leads to her death in childbirth. Thirty years later, he now wants to murder the girls because he’s having dreams that they will show up eventually as the Spider-Women and murder him. Questions like what exactly Sims does, how he has amassed the fortune he seems to have, or why anyone should care about him at all are left unanswered.
The second half of the movie thus focuses primarily on the four women constantly barely escaping Sims, until, of course, they have a big final battle with him that ends exactly as you think it will.
Along the way, we’re forced to endure a bunch of scenes of Johnson moping around New York (she seems to want to be in the movie even less than we want to watch her in it) with her best friend and fellow EMS Ben Parker. (Yes, that is exactly who you think it is.) Ben’s sister is pregnant with her first child and the lengths the movie goes to so that it can avoid saying the baby’s name would be actually kind of funny in a better movie, but here it just comes across as tired. (And in case you’re wondering why the movie needed to be set in 2003, there’s your answer.) Sweeney, O’Connor, and Merced all do a good job with the little that they’re given—some of the few enjoyable moments of the movie are the three of them learning to get along—but while all three are fine actors, it stretches believability beyond the breaking point that they are young teens. And that’s definitely not helped by the fact that Sweeney has another (actually, quite good) movie currently in theaters in which she plays an adult woman.
But if the women playing much younger characters was the only ridiculous point in the movie, it might still work. Instead, our intelligence is also assaulted by moments like an ambulance being t-boned by a dump truck slamming into it at full speed, and then minutes later the camera pulling back to reveal that the dump truck was, apparently, going 40 or 50 miles per hour while hurtling toward the edge of a dock that’s about 100 feet away. Or Cassie stealing a NY taxi cab and then proceeding to drive that around the city for the rest of the movie, after the cab owner apparently just decided that losing his cab wasn’t really a big enough deal to report to the police. Or her decision, in the middle of trying to save the girls, to hop off to Peru, where she then tracks through the jungle alone in order to learn about her past. Or paramedic Ben deciding to rush his sister to the hospital in his own car rather than waiting for his colleagues to arrive in the ambulance.
They even went so far as to include the line, “Once you have this power, it will come with great responsibility.” I saw the movie in a fairly crowded theater and was at least gratified that I wasn’t the only one to laugh out loud at just how ridiculous, and ultimately desperate, the inclusion of this line was. (We all just shook our heads and groaned when it was repeated a second time.)
Oh, and let me answer the big question I’m sure you have: being a modern comic book movie, does this have a post- or mid-credit scene? The answer is no. That may sound surprising, until you realize that Madame Web is essentially nothing more than a 2-hour post-credit scene intended to do little more than set up the sequel, in which presumably the three girls will finally get their powers and, hopefully, fight a villain who is actually worth fighting. (And also, hopefully, play adult versions of themselves.) But that would require Sony to hire a director and writers who are interested in doing something more than just churning out a contractually mandated film. And given the recent history of the non-animated Spider-Man Universe films, there seems little hope of that happening.
