Madame Web is 2024’s answer to 2004’s disastrous comic book film Catwoman

Madame Web. // Courtesy Sony Pictures

The year is 2004, and you are 16. It’s the end of July, so to escape the sweltering heat, you and your friends see a movie at the mall. The movie is Catwoman, starring Halle Berry, but it could be anything. All you want is to be in a place with air conditioning that isn’t your house.

You and your friends spend so much on chips and salsa at the mall Mexican joint and cheap jewelry at Claire’s that you barely have enough wadded up cash from your summer job to cover the ticket. In years to come, you’ll have fond memories of those friends, the virgin strawberry daiquiri you ordered, and even the cheap jewelry. You will remember nothing about the movie, except that it was bad.

The year is 2024, and you’re 35. It’s February, and to avoid staring at the dead grass outside your window, you go to the theater with friends. The movie is Madame Web, starring Dakota Johnson, even though it should be something, anything else. Maybe it was the only movie that worked with everyone’s schedules, but like, come on. You’re an adult, you don’t want to see Poor Things or American Fiction? 

You and your friends have full-time jobs, so you can get drinks beforehand, and even spring for popcorn at the theater. As the film starts, you’re hit with a wave of nostalgia, and it is decidedly mixed. The movie’s effects are terrible. The performances are flat, the character motivations barely existent.

And yet, as you watch, the flavors of restaurant salsa and syrupy mocktails flood your senses. The phantom weight of a tiger’s eye energy bracelet rubs against your wrist.

And that feeling? It’s kind of great.

While the early-adolescent memories Madame Web inspires are good, the movie itself is undeniably a mess of the Catwoman variety. That the film is set in 2003 almost reads like an in-joke, because its whole vibe radiates the “how do we make a superhero movie/why are we even bothering?” ethos that defined comic book adaptations from 2000-2005.

If you’re looking for a nostalgic afternoon spent hooting at an incompetently made movie with your friends while you slam Clearly Canadians and cartons of Hot Tamales in the back row, you’re in for a treat. In all other cases, you’re better off spending your time and money elsewhere.

Madame Web follows Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson), an EMT in New York who grew up an orphan after her mom died while studying spiders in the Amazon. After a near-death experience, Cassie gets visions that allow her to see a few moments into the future. These visions bring her in contact with a trio of teens (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor) who are each being targeted by a creep in a suit (Tahar Rahim, trying and failing to force an American accent). It turns out Rahim’s baddie, Ezekiel Sims, is the guy who killed Cassie’s mom and made her an orphan! He’s after the girls because in the distant future, they’ll be superheroes (with powers they currently don’t possess, but whatever) and kill him.

The plot threads binding these story beats together are as delicate as an actual spider’s web, albeit woven by a drunk spider. This is the kind of movie that repeats lines three different ways so that you can’t miss the implications of what people are saying, only to jump to a scene where a character drops a piece of exposition that makes no sense. 

Characters behave in ways no normal human would. At one point Cassie decides she needs to go to Peru to find herself, and just…gets there seconds later (by now she’s wanted for presumably kidnapping the teens in her care, so how she managed to hop an international flight last minute during a historically heavy crackdown in airport security is beyond me).

You see where this is going. Madame Web is “bad movie podcast” bad. It’s “Make-your-own-MST3K” bad. It’s also “Bored teenager with spending money” bad, which can be kind of fun if you’re a) a bored teenager, or b) a bored adult looking to replicate that experience, but with all of the things you couldn’t treat yourself to when you were a bored teenager.

If that’s the experience you’re after, you have my blessing. If it’s not, you can easily do a hell of a lot better.

Madame Web. // Courtesy Sony Pictures