Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Madame Web’ on Netflix, a Megafiasco That Traps Poor Dakota Johnson in Superhero Hell

I just watched Pepsi-Cola Presents Madame Web (now streaming on Netflix, in addition to VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), and boy is my everything tired. Honestly, I was exhausted even before pressing play; the public discourse prior to its release (“He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died”), star Dakota Johnson’s nutty (and admittedly entertaining) press tour and its vociferous trashing by critics and moviegoers alike after its theatrical release all created quite a mighty din. And so the bilious reaction to the “Sony Spider-Man Universe” continues to escalate – it began with two very dumb Venom movies, and continued with 2022’s Morbius, which had me thinking the series couldn’t possibly inspire more ridicule. Silly me.  

MADAME WEB: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: THE PERUVIAN AMAZON, 1973: Madame Web’s mom (Kerry Bishe) finally, finally finds the spider she’s been searching for – a spider that has some truly amazing peptides, the type of venom-derived peptides that, the script tells us, can supercharge cellular structure. Let’s hear it for peptides that supercharge cellular structure! Hooray for the peptides. She’s also pregnant, but that doesn’t stop Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim) from shooting her and stealing the spider and leaving her for dead so some Peruvian spider-people known as Las Aranas can rescue her and take her to a magic cave for a magic bath so she can be bitten by one of the special spiders in the hopes that those peptides can save her. It doesn’t work and she dies but the baby doesn’t. Don’t you HATE it when that HAPPENS?

Now we jump to 2003, where we meet that baby of destiny, all growed up: Cassandra Webb (Johnson), surely voted Best Bangs on an NYC EMT several years running. She’s a lonely sort with a cat, and to show us that she’s a lonely sort, she talks to the cat a lot and sadly thumbs through old photos of her mom. Her best bud-slash-ambulance partner is a guy named – hold onto yer hats true believers! – Ben Parker (Adam Scott), which has implications, my friends, major effing implications. One day, as she attends – put your hats back on so you can hold onto them again – Mary Parker’s (Emma Roberts) baby shower – who could possibly be in her tum-tum? – and drinks an ice-cold can of Pepsi-Cola, she and Ben are summoned to a rescue scene that goes sideways and nearly ends her. While she’s dead for a few minutes, she finds herself in an ugly and shitty special effect, and after Ben resuscitates her, she immediately says “I just wanna go home and watch Idol,” because it’s 2003, yo. 

The ugly shitty special effect wasn’t nothing, of course. Cassie starts seeing glimpses into the future via confusing flash-forwards. This doesn’t happen all the time, only when very important things are going to happen, so yes, that means it happens precisely when the plot needs it. At this point the plot reintroduces us to Ezekiel as he beds a pretty lady, has a nightmare and engages in the worst pillow talk ever: “It’s not a dream. I’m gonna be murdered one day,” he says. His visions are clear: Three Spider-Women will take him out, so he goes about trying to find those women and take them out first, using computer composites and advanced surveillance tech that’s so complex and impossible, the movie doesn’t explain it, because it’d be way too difficult to do so convincingly. So we just move on.

Who are those Spider-Women, you ask? Well, they’re not Spider-Women yet, just average teenagers: Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced) and Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor). One day all three of these young women who don’t know each other end up on the same train as Cassie, who envisumalizes what’s about to happen, somehow convinces them that her envisumalization isn’t the ravings of a lunatic, and saves them from an attack by Ezekiel, who wears a black Spider-Mannish costume. Destiny, it seems, is really stinking afoot here. And destiny will lead our heroines to a thoroughly inscrutable finish at an Itchy and Scratchy fireworks factory topped by a giant Pepsi-Cola sign, as it damn well should, since being a shameless advertisement is the only thing this movie successfully achieves. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Deep breath: You’ve got Green Lantern, Elektra, Fantastic Four (2015), Fantastic Four (2005), Suicide Squad (2016)… time hasn’t vindicated any of these losers. Time to add a new one to this hall-of-shame list. 

Performance Worth Watching: Johnson’s really it’s-a-living her way through this thing. She’s been through it before, in the 50 Shadeses, so by now she should be a pro at gutting it out. As an unapologetic DK fanboy, I just want to send her flowers and a nice card after this one. I can’t help but contemplate critic Gene Siskel’s famous criteria for judging a film: “Is the movie more interesting than the same actors having lunch?” In this case, I’d specifically amend that to put Johnson and Sweeney across from each other in a cozy diner booth having a sad-eyes staring contest over a slice of pie – first one to cry loses. That would be way more watchable than Madame Web. 

Memorable Dialogue: My fave doozy in a script full of ’em: “There’s not enough frictional force in the bare human foot to overcome gravity and keep him stuck to the wall, much less the ceiling!” says Anya Corazon, like anyone would breathlessly blurt as they’re trying to escape being killed by a spider-madman.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: A few sudden bursts of unintentional hilarity don’t save Madame Web from being unwatchable – unwatchable like a fox. The screenplay is a series of exponentially escalating incomprehensible storytelling decisions resulting in a bona-fide NONSENSE FUGUE. There’s a scene in which Cassie tells her teenage proteges, “Don’t do anything dumb,” immediately followed by a reiteration: “Seriously, don’t do dumb things.” Has she read this screenplay? It consists entirely of dumb things! They have no choice! One wonders if Johnson read it either, before hopefully being paid very well for this. (Note: She surely did read it. In a recent interview she essentially said this was one of those movies that looked like one thing when she signed on and became something entirely different after. She knew it was a disaster. She knew The Discourse was coming. Here’s another fistful of daisies, Dakota.)

I’ll attempt to be fair from here on out: Criticisms aimed at the struggle to decipher the nature of Cassie/Madame Web’s powers are waylaid if you simply consider that they’re like Spider-Man’s spider-sense, except, like, more complicated ‘n’ shit. Sweeney was cast in this movie before she became the sex-symbol sensation she is now, which explains why she doesn’t get much screen time frankly, it ends up working in her favor). It might be fun to watch if you’ve just hit the weed store – might be. It could function as a cautionary tale for anyone who might be considering getting hit in the face with a firework while drowning (I refuse to contextualize this statement). And you get to experience the nutty, nutty circumstances surrounding the birth of Peter Parker. Other than that, Madame Web is a baffling, harebrained megadud.  

P.S. Coke is better.

Our Call: I wanted to like this movie. Scratch that – I wanted to like disliking this movie. Just back the FTD delivery truck into Dakota’s driveway and SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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