Dakota Johnson delivers a remarkably disinterested performance as a clairvoyant superhero in this shoddy Spider-Man spin-off.
There was a time, not so long ago, when every Hollywood actor – A-Lister or aspiring – wanted to be in a superhero movie. At the height of its success, the genre made superstars out of up-and-coming performers including Chris Evans, Brie Larson and Chris Pratt, to the extent it seemed almost a rite of passage to play a role – hero or villain – in a Marvel or DC project. But lately it’s felt like the bubble is close to bursting. Since Avengers: End Game concluded Marvel’s Infinity Saga in 2019, the studios have seen diminishing box office returns (still obscene numbers, but not as lucrative as they had hoped) and increasing pushback from the critical sphere. Even the fans, usually reliably sympathetic to the cause, have been expressing their growing ambivalence, while stars such as Robert Downey Jr – whose career was revitalised and arguably defined for a decade by Iron Man – expressing, if not regret, a certain happiness to be out of the superhero churn.
Not a great time to be launching new superhero projects then. In sharp contrast to Marvel, Sony have been trying to get their own Extended Universe off the ground for a while. Piggybacking off the success of their Spider-Man films (some of which have been made in collaboration with Marvel) they have been plundering the depths of Webslinger lore for potential gold. The animated Spiderverse films have proven highly successful, and even the Venom films, starring Tom Hardy, have been lucrative if not critically divisive. But Morbius, released in 2021, was a critical and commercial flop (and an embarrassment, as online trolls managed to convince Sony to put it back in cinemas through a meme campaign, only for it to flop again on rerelease). Their 2024 hopes lie with Spidey villain spin-off Kraven the Hunter (pushed back from 2023 to this summer) and Madame Web, loosely based on various iterations of Spider-Woman.
When the first trailer for the film dropped towards the end of 2023 it was widely panned online for its dodgy-looking effects and star Dakota Johnson’s flat line delivery, possessing all the enthusiasm of a teenager reluctantly cast in a school production of Death of a Salesman. While social media buzz can build hype for a film, the public ridicule aimed at Madame Web did not bode well for Sony’s efforts at firmly establishing a live-action Spiderverse.
It’s difficult to say why Dakota Johnson took the role of Cassie Webb, an orphan who discovers she possesses clairvoyant powers and must use them to protect three teenage girls from grave danger. Perhaps Johnson’s agent felt she should do a superhero movie as many of her peers have – a sort of acting box-ticking exercise. It’s the sort of move that would have made sense a decade ago when Johnson was fresh off her Fifty Shades of Grey contract. Now, best loved for her deadpan press appearances and wry turns in various indie projects, it’s a little more perplexing that Johnson would see Madame Web as a great career opportunity. Certainly it can’t have been the script that reeled her in, flat and lifeless as it is, consisting largely of characters worriedly delivering lines of exposition to each other and a few lacklustre fight scenes.
Equally lost are Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor, who play Julia Cornwall, Anya Corazon and Mattie Franklin, the teenagers who are targeted by nefarious Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim) who has prophetic visions of them killing him sometime in his future. They don’t yet possess their spider-powers – the film offers no indication of when they will get them either – so the film largely revolves around Cassie playing an arduous game of keep-away as she tries to conceal the teens from Ezekiel’s wrath.
Meanwhile, the film attempts to connect itself to the Spiderverse with the inclusion of Peter Parker’s uncle Ben (Adam Scott) who works with Cassie, and his sister-in-law Mary (Emma Roberts). Mary is pregnant during the film, and it’s strongly implied the baby is the future Peter Parker. Still, the film stops short of actually saying this (perhaps due to past complications Sony has faced around connecting their standalone projects to their Marvel collaborations). Sony may decree that Madame Web actually takes place in an alternate dimension to the Tom Holland Spider-Man films, because that seems to be the move whenever a studio creates a superhero that is less successful than they predicted.
Yet these corny attempts at worldbuilding all feel incredibly lazy, neither committed enough for Spider-Man die-hards nor intriguing enough for casual fans. A scene in which Cassie travels to Peru to seek answers about her spider powers is laughably old-fashioned, while the film’s shoddy editing and constant spinning camerawork only serve to make the audience feel as if they have contracted acute vertigo. With its 2003 setting, Madame Web is technically a modern period piece, but aside from a clumsy scene where a radio DJ remarks “This song is gonna be huge!” as he plays Britney Spears’ Toxic, there’s precious little about the film that makes it feel like it’s set 20 years in the past. “They can track you through those now,” One character says nervously as another pulls out her cell phone. Meanwhile, the villains have access to a live, hi-tech surveillance system that covers the entire New York and New Jersey area with facial recognition software. This is supposed to be 2003.
There’s just something gratingly cheap about the affair, from script to cinematography to performances, as if no one involved wanted to be there. Johnson sleepwalks through her scenes, radiating indifference, while her three teenage accomplices are interchangeable and Rahim’s Big Bad is a generic moustache-twirling bore. If there’s one positive, it’s that Madame Web is so completely forgettable, it’s unlikely to do any damage to the cast’s career prospects going forward. It should, however, give Sony pause for thought about what exactly their game plan is going forward, and if this path of giving every Spider-Man B-character their own film is really something anyone, fan or not, really wants.
Little White Lies is committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them.
Published 15 Feb 2024
The superhero fatigue is real.
I checked my watch about five times, willing the minutes to go faster.
Not quite Morbius bad, but still a bottom of the barrel moment for Sony.
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Little White Lies was established in 2005 as a bi-monthly print magazine committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them. Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism, we’ve been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.” Our reviews feature a unique tripartite ranking system that captures the different aspects of the movie-going experience. We believe in Truth & Movies.
