Madame Web: Yet Another Sony Failure

About halfway through Madame Web, should one choose to see it, viewers will find themselves asking whether this whole thing (and Sony’s Spider-Man villain universe of movies by extension) is an elaborate practical joke because there is no way this movie was made by people who thought they were delivering even a passable final product. Following Morbius and Venom and Venom: Let There Be Carnage, there has to be a point where one questions what is going on with these movies because they are just not good. Madame Web is probably the worst of these however because there is definitely potential in this film for there to be something good but at any opportunity to do the smart thing, the studio makes a bad decision.

Madame Web follows Cassandra Web (Dakota Johnson) who suffers a near-death experience and suddenly gains the ability to see the future. In seeing the future, she crosses paths with Julia Carpenter (Sydney Sweeney), Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor), and Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced), three teenagers destined to become variants of Spider-Woman and have all become the target of Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim) who intends to kill them because he dreams that the three will kill him in the future.

The film is not entirely bad and there are two strong points that are not leaned into quite as much as they should. The first is the villain Ezekiel Sims, specifically when he is in the pseudo-Spider-Man costume and actively trying to kill the four protagonists. This portrayal is interesting because it plays with the idea of what an evil Spider-Man could be and how scary that concept could be. The other is the dynamic between Cassandra, Julia, Mattie, and Anya when they have the chance to act against each other and show the chemistry the cast has. Unfortunately, it takes about half the movie for them to come together and the narrative seems hellbent on splitting them up for no good reason.

Basically, everything else about the movie falls into the negative. The editing is inadequate, the cinematography is nonsensical, the action is lacking, and it feels (much like Morbius) like it is multiple cuts of the same movie spliced together and it does not make a ton of sense. Basically, any scene in the movie falls apart with any critical thinking, it seems like 95 percent of dialogue coming from Tahar Rahim was recorded and redubbed in post-production to comical effect, and no character has solid motivation or cares about the stakes. The emotional climax for the film where Cassandra comes to terms with her past is entirely exposited in the moment because the key character relationship at the center of that resolution was never addressed prior to that moment.

Ultimately the biggest antagonist for Madame Web and the Spider-Women in this film is not Ezekiel Sims, it is the hubris of a studio that seems to think time and time again that they can salvage a movie in post with reshoots and deliver a competently made product. The Sony Universe of Marvel Characters did not have the strong start that the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC Extended Universe, or even the Dark Universe at Universal had and has continually gone downhill from there. It really is a shame that Madame Web is as bad as it is since the cast is surprisingly solid and a Julia Carpenter or Anya Corazon or Mattie Franklin Spider-Woman solo movie would have been interesting and worth watching. Something needs to change at Sony, and that starts with skipping Madame Web.

Final Rating: 2/10