Madame Web Review - The Superhero Movie That Accidentally Went Viral (For All the Wrong Reasons)

Madame Web Review: The Superhero Movie That Accidentally Went Viral

Rating: 1.5/5

There is a moment in Madame Web where Dakota Johnson, playing a paramedic with budding clairvoyance, walks away from an exploding ambulance in slow motion. The shot is held for what feels like a full geological era. The expression on her face suggests she is either having a vision of the multiverse unraveling or silently calculating how many months of rent this paycheck will cover. The film never clarifies which.

That shot is Madame Web in miniature. Expensive, inscrutable, and accidentally hilarious.

The Plot, Such as It Is

Let me attempt to summarize the story. Cassandra Webb is a New York paramedic who drowns during a routine rescue, comes back to life, and discovers she can see brief flashes of the future. She spends the entire film trying to protect three teenagers she has never met from a villain named Ezekiel Sims, who wants to murder them because his own future-vision powers told him they will eventually become Spider-Women and kill him.

Yes, the villain is motivated by precognition. Yes, the hero is also motivated by precognition. No, the film never engages with the paradox that both of them are using the exact same ability to draw diametrically opposed conclusions from the same data.

This is not a movie with a plot. It is a screensaver with occasional dialogue.

Cassandra’s mother, we are told, was in the Amazon researching spiders while pregnant with her. Mysterious tribespeople with vaguely glowing eyes and healing powers saved baby Cassandra after mom was shot by Ezekiel, who was also in the Amazon researching spiders, apparently, and also got bitten by one, which gave him his powers. The tribespeople are the Las Arañas, which is Spanish for “the spiders,” because subtlety is for screenwriters with self-respect.

Everyone involved in this film’s premise, at some point, was in the Amazon. Looking for spiders. It is genuinely difficult to overstate how much of the film’s exposition boils down to “and then another person went to the Amazon.”

The Infamous Line

Let’s talk about the line. You’ve seen it on social media. You’ve probably said it out loud in a sarcastic voice. From the trailer:

“He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.”

Take a moment to parse that sentence. Who is the “he” in the Amazon? With whose mom? Whose spiders? Who died? The grammar collapses under its own weight. It is a sentence that sounds like it was back-translated from Portuguese by someone who had only been informed of English via a brochure.

The best part: this line is not in the actual film. It appears only in the trailer. Someone at Sony Pictures Marketing looked at a focus group screening, watched this line kill in the room, and decided to put the worst sentence ever spoken in cinema in the promotional material. When the film underperformed, that same marketing team presumably blamed the director, the cast, or God.

Dakota Johnson’s Quiet Rebellion

Dakota Johnson, to her enormous credit, appears to have realized within the first week of filming that she was starring in a disaster. Her performance is a master class in low-key sabotage. Every line reading carries the subtle energy of someone mentally composing their apology statement for the press tour.

Speaking of which, the press tour is its own cinematic experience and arguably more entertaining than the film itself. Johnson openly admitted in interviews that parts of the film she shot do not appear in the final cut. That her dialogue was re-recorded in post. That she had no idea what the plot was about until she saw the finished product. At one point she told a reporter that “making the movie was pretty fun” before immediately clarifying, “but I don’t mean fun in the normal sense of the word.”

When your own star is doing press in the voice of a hostage reading a ransom note, something has gone structurally wrong.

Tahar Rahim Deserves Better

The villain, Ezekiel Sims, is played by Tahar Rahim, a genuinely gifted French actor who has been Oscar-nominated, who has won international awards, and who is capable of nuanced, layered performances.

His dialogue in this film is entirely dubbed over in post-production by what sounds like a different actor speaking phonetically. Every line is ADR. You can see his mouth forming different words than the ones coming out. It is as if the studio decided, mid-production, that Rahim’s voice was too French, his delivery too complex, his performance too interesting. So they overlaid generic “menacing American villain” vocals over every scene.

The result is a villain who never sounds like he is in the same room as anyone else. It is genuinely uncanny. You are watching a man act, and hearing a stranger speak on his behalf. It gives every confrontation a surreal, liminal quality, as if Ezekiel is an AI deepfake of himself.

Rahim’s agent deserves hazard pay for whatever he had to negotiate to get his client into this movie, and triple time for whatever happened afterward.

The Three Future-Spider-Women

Cassandra spends most of the movie babysitting three teenage girls who, in the comics and future MCU continuity, eventually become three Spider-Women. In this film, they do not become Spider-Women. They just run around New York in matching outfits and periodically scream.

The three actresses (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor) do their professional best, but they are stuck playing characters who exist purely to fulfill a future that the film cannot show us because this is the prequel to a sequel that never happened and never will.

One of the most bizarre choices in modern cinema is to market these three as future superheroes, put them in promotional art wearing Spider-Woman costumes, and then have them spend the film exclusively in street clothes. The one shot of them in costume, the one moment fans would have paid to see, happens in a brief dream-vision about three seconds long. The film’s closing scene leaves Cassandra blind, pregnant (in some cosmic multiverse sense), and the girls unsuperheroified. We will never see them again. Ever.

The Production Story Is the Real Movie

The making of Madame Web is more coherent than Madame Web. Sony Pictures, determined to make use of their Spider-Man character licensing rights without actually having Spider-Man, has spent the better part of a decade trying to build a cinematic universe around Spider-Man’s second-tier supporting cast.

This has given us Venom, which worked by accident because Tom Hardy committed so hard to playing both halves of a dysfunctional relationship with his own inner monster. It gave us Morbius, which became ironically beloved purely through internet meme energy. It gave us Kraven the Hunter, a film Sony shelved for so long that the star aged out of being a plausible action lead during the delay.

And it gave us this. A film whose entire existence is a byproduct of a contract clause that says Sony has to make movies featuring Spider-Man-adjacent characters at regular intervals, or the rights revert to Disney. Madame Web is not a creative endeavor. It is legal compliance given a production budget.

What It Gets Right (Yes, There’s a List)

I have been harsh, but in the interest of professional integrity, here are the things Madame Web does well:

1. The costume designers clearly put effort into the early-2000s period aesthetic. The film is set in 2003 for reasons that are never adequately explained, but the Nokia phones and Beyoncé tracks are authentic.
2. The ambulance-based action sequence is genuinely well-shot, if completely disconnected from anything resembling narrative purpose.
3. Dakota Johnson’s deadpan is, in isolation, often quite funny. She is the funniest thing in her own disaster movie, which speaks to her comic timing.
4. It is only 116 minutes. Given what the film is, this is a mercy.

That is the list. I tried to make it longer. I could not.

The Box Office Reckoning

Madame Web was made for an estimated $80 million. It grossed about $100 million globally. Sounds like a tiny profit, until you factor in marketing, distribution, and the unwritten rule that a film needs to more than double its production budget to actually break even. By that metric, Madame Web is a financial sinkhole, and Sony knows it.

The reaction was swift. Kraven’s release was delayed. Multiple other Sony Spider-Verse spinoffs were quietly canceled. A generation of studio executives learned, in the way that only a $50 million loss can teach you, that maybe you need Spider-Man to have a Spider-Man Cinematic Universe.

The Verdict

Madame Web is a fascinating artifact. As a superhero film, it is almost impressively bad. As a case study in franchise extension gone wrong, it is invaluable. As an unintentional comedy, it is a modern masterpiece of corporate desperation.

Should you watch it? Yes. Not because it is good, but because it is the kind of cinematic disaster that future film students will study to understand how studios can spend nine figures to produce something that no one, not even the people making it, actually wanted.

Watch it with friends. Drinks help. Keep the captions on for Ezekiel’s scenes so you can confirm that yes, those really are the words he is saying, even though that is clearly not the actor’s voice. And when Dakota Johnson says the line about the Amazon, pause the movie and take a moment to appreciate that somewhere, a marketing executive made a career-ending decision to put that in the trailer.

Final Score: 1.5/5 - A gloriously bad movie that accidentally became more culturally significant than it ever deserved. Genuine recommendation for bad-movie-night curators.

Who Should Watch This

• Fans of cinematic disasters. This is a modern classic of the genre.
• Anyone who enjoyed the press tour memes and wants to experience them in their original habitat.
• Students of film production who want to see what happens when rights compliance meets creative bankruptcy.

Who Should Skip This

• Actual Spider-Man fans. This film does not have Spider-Man. It does not explain why the Spider-Women do not become Spider-Women. It is Spider-Man-adjacent only in the sense that any film with spiders in the title can be Spider-Man-adjacent.
• Anyone who genuinely enjoys coherent plots, audible dialogue, or facial expressions that match spoken lines.
• Dakota Johnson, presumably, who has spent two years trying to forget this happened.