If you were planning on seeing Madame Web anytime soon, let me save you some time and money by saying don’t. Madame Web, starring Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, and Tahar Rahim, debuted with a 13% critics’ rating and a 54% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes on Valentine’s Day. I recently bought the Regal Unlimited membership, with the intention of hopefully seeing a movie a week, so upon its opening, I decided to see Madame Web. I’d seen the reviews about it, with everyone saying it was both horribly written and directed, but I decided to see it anyway. When Black Widow came out, there were many reviews saying it was awful, but a lot of those reviews were because of the misogyny in the Marvel and superhero communities, so I thought the case would be the same for Madame Web. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It was the worst movie I’ve seen all year. Granted, the year did just start, but I have a feeling, that come December, it’ll still be the worst movie I saw all year.
I’m a huge Dakota Johnson fan; she’s the one who made me want to see this. I’m also a fan of Sydney Sweeney’s personal character – I enjoy her socials and interviews – though sometimes, I feel like her acting is lackluster, but usually enjoy her work nonetheless. This movie, though, I can’t say I enjoyed this. The dialogue was all over the place. There was so little emotion from most of the characters when they were literally fighting for their lives at some points, and the plot fell short the entire movie.
Madame Web is a new character for the big screen but is a pre-existing character from the comics, first introduced in a 1980 issue of The Amazing Spider-Man. Cassie Webb is a paramedic who drowns and dies but is brought back to life via CPR, which activates her superpowers, such as being able to see the future. She is put on a mission to save three girls, Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Anya (Isabela Merced), and Mattie (Celeste O’Connor), from the clutches of Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim), who wants them dead due to dreams he has of them killing him.
The girls also have powers in Ezekiel’s dreams that you would never know even existed if not for the dreams shown. I know the comics explain their powers and abilities, but there wasn’t even an inkling of the girls having any sort of power in the movie. If you watched the trailer, you saw all the scenes of the girls having powers. Even at the end of the movie, Cassie is telling the girls they will do great things in the future with their powers, but at that point, they still don’t have any sort of new ability. I figured this was a setup for future movies, but not even giving a hint of what Julia, Anya, and Mattie could do would make the audience not care enough to return for a second movie.
Beyond the weak plot, there was also terrible dialogue. For example, about halfway through the movie, Ezekiel says, “Every day that goes by, my appointment with death gets closer.” I can’t think of a more cliché line for a villain to say than “my appointment with death…” The conversations between all of the characters were so poorly written and gave them hardly any personality. On top of that, Ezekiel has an assistant who is never even introduced properly, who helps him track the girls and who is in maybe three scenes.
The ending was the part that really solidified it for me. The second to last scene has Cassie in a hospital bed after she had just defeated Ezekiel, by killing him with the famous Long Island City Pepsi-Cola sign. She has a bandage on her eyes, which made a bunch of question marks appear in my head because she was in the hospital because she drowned. Last time I checked, you didn’t go blind from drowning! That wasn’t even the worst part. That scene ends and the last scene comes on and she’s blind and in a wheelchair!!! How does that even happen? What happened to her legs???? Upon further research, I discovered that Madame Web’s character in the comics is an elderly blind woman with paralysis and that Sony cast a younger actress to make it more action-packed, which makes sense, to an extent. But the revelation was insane, because at no point in the movie would I have thought that would happen.
Overall, this movie sucked and I wouldn’t recommend it unless you were going to give it a hate-watch. I’m always surprised when star-stacked movies like this are disappointing, because how do you have so many great actors and none of them say anything about how awful the plot, dialogue, and production is? I wouldn’t consider myself as any sort of film-bro or anything but I feel obligated to report on how horrific this movie was.