Madame Web

As soon as the trailer for Madame Web dropped in November, the internet lost its mind. One particular line delivered in a flat, expressionless voice over captured the attention of the meme factory, amplified by the general cheesy and silly nature of the whole thing. It surely didn’t help that the previous live-action Sony superhero movie was the critically panned and mercilessly mocked Morbius. While it made some money, I’d have expected them to shy away from its lack of star power moving forward, favoring a return to the strategy that made Venom the seventh highest grossing film of 2018. Nope! Sure, audiences know Dakota Johnson, and they may clock Adam Scott and Sydney Sweeney depending on their media diet. However, none of them are proven box office draws, especially in the superhero genre. Add that to most audiences having never heard of Madame Web, and Sony’s strategy seems downright bizarre.

Still, stranger moves have resulted in good (or at least entertaining) work. If anything, all the negative attention was to its benefit, as my expectations were quite low walking into the theater. My hope was that it would lean into its strangeness, and we’d get a weird, wild flick that took huge swings, leading to a fun time, even if it couldn’t be called “good” exactly.

The first couple of sequences immediately signaled trouble. Surprisingly, not with the story. For one, these first bits are just setting up characters and plot details that will come back later. But also, the overarching story of the movie isn’t that bad. A little silly, sure, and it has some clunky plot contrivances, but that’s more or less a given in the genre at this point. Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim) has repeated visions of three female superheros killing him in a few years, so he resolves to hunt them down and kill them now, before they get their powers. A near-drowning causes Cassandra (Dakota Johnson) to discover powers of her own, just in time to become the unwilling protector of teenagers Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Anya (Isabela Merced) and Mattie (Celeste O’Connor). A fine if somewhat convoluted setup, with possibilities of exploring how trying to prevent the future inevitably invites it. To be clear, the actual plot beats are quite awful, playing nicely into my overall impression that the ideas here aren’t the problem, it’s the piss poor execution.

Case in point, the camera work and editing. They’re so egregious, I have to imagine even the casual filmgoer will notice how everything feels wrong, even if they can’t put their finger on why.

These scenes, a preamble concerning Cassandra’s mother (Kerry Bishé) in the Amazon thirty years ago, are primarily shot handheld, complete with floating frames and unmotivated mini zooms. Think The Office or Parks & Rec, except not positioned as a documentary. As you’d expect, it makes the camera feel awkward and needlessly aggressive. It stands out even more since its usage throughout the rest of the film is inconsistent, disrupting any chance of a cohesive visual style.

Editing is not something even the most intense movie nerds think too much about: it should melt into the background, never giving you a reason to notice it. But in scenes with any amount of tension, all of a sudden the shots get super short and choppy, making them incredibly disorienting. The takes selected can’t be the best versions…can they? None are aided by the camera work, which include lots of blurred figures and fades and strange angles, all of which refuse to allow you to get a foothold in the scene. Sometimes, the effect is intentional, to help you feel how disorienting the visions are for Cassandra at first. However, it starts before her powers emerge, and continues long after she gets a hold on them, meaning for much of the movie it’s going for a style, but that style is confusion.

As you might guess, this all gets a lot worse during action scenes. We get a taste early on while EMTs Cassandra and Ben (Adam Scott) are racing a patient to the hospital, but the ineptitude really shines during fight scenes. It feels like we’ve warped back to the mid-00s, when nearly every action movie emulated the Jason Bourne shaky cam, but only succeeded at swinging the camera around wildly to dilute the action instead of foreground its chaos. The quick cutting (also popularized in the Bourne movies) makes sure we can’t get our footing, reducing images to streaks of color which melt together into an incomprehensible muddiness. And the jittery frame refuses to let us settle down. I walked out knowing I’d seen characters fight, but I can’t recall seeing any punches land.

The film also refuses to establish any visual shortcuts to make the viewing less laborious. Most notably, it takes until the climactic showdown for it to realize it doesn’t have to show every vision Cassandra experiences of some version of events that goes horribly wrong. If you just display her having an unnatural knowledge of what’s going to happen, we’ll get it. I will say, there is one solid deployment of it for information gathering leading up to the climax. Unfortunately, it’s the exception when it feels necessary after the first few times.

But by far the most baffling element of the film is Ezekiel’s dialogue. I’m not talking about his bananas accent. Nor his lines, which aren’t great, but aren’t The Room levels of bad. The problem is that clearly most, if not all, of his voice is ADR. One telltale sign of ADR is when we hear a character’s voice when they’re either off-screen or have their back to the camera. Not always, of course, but it’s an ideal spot to fix dialog since the actor doesn’t need to worry about matching their previous lip movements. I’d estimate about 90% of the time Ezekiel speaks, we can’t see his mouth clearly. Either his back is to us, he’s off-screen, or he’s moving and the poor camera work fails to track his face well. At least a few times in the other 10%, the words don’t match his mouth or the audio is clearly from a different take. I can’t find any information online about what happened here, or why this may have been necessary. All I know is that it quickly became incredibly distracting.

None of the craft problems are alleviated by the performances. No one is doing their best work, least of all Johnson, from who we know we can expect more. She’s sleepwalking through every element of the film, bored or overacting in every frame. It’s hard to blame her too much, as one has to assume she got a pretty penny to be here, a welcome sight after she hasn’t had anything resembling a financial hit since The Peanut Butter Falcon five years ago. Doesn’t change how painful it is to watch. None of the supporting actors are doing much of anything, either. The closest to okay is probably O’Connor, who at least feels like a real person, albeit a poorly written one. Needless to say, there won’t be any breakouts from this nightmare.

It’s easy to understand why this movie exists. It went into development pre-COVID, at the height of popularity and success for both the MCU and Spider-Man. The MCU had long been (rightly) criticized for its lack of female-led movies, and the DCEU’s Wonder Woman had recently demonstrated their strong box office potential. And Sony wanted to build up their stable of non-Spider-Man characters in the wake of two tremendously successful Spider-Man series. But what’s harder to understand is why this is what we got. Production and filming completed over a year ago (save for some re-shoots), and we haven’t heard any particular horror stories. They’d have had no real reason to drop support for the project before then: while production wrapped after Morbius underperformed, it was well before the poor box office of 2023 caused prognosticators to declare the death of superhero movies. Maybe it comes down to director S. J. Clarkson coming from the world of TV, where she’s been directing high profile shows for fifteen to twenty years. So she lacks film experience, save for a made for TV movie in 2010. While she helmed a few episodes of both Jessica Jones and The Defenders, those require quite a different skill set from proper action flicks.

Whatever the case may be, we’re left with an complete and utter mess. It’s a film that has no idea what it’s trying to do, why any of its plot decisions matter, or how to execute the few ideas it has. Easily the worst film of the year so far, the only question will be if it can retain that dubious distinction for the next ten months.

I’m betting yes.