Madame Web is not the kind of bad you think it is
The joys of Dakota Johnson's apathetic superhero flick are more complicated and more base than you may think
Film Features Madame Web
The most famous line from Madame Web doesn’t actually appear in the movie. “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died,” a clunky, ADR-dubbed expositional sentence that could have used a run through Grammarly, was an invention for the trailer. That trailer, combined with Dakota Johnson’s completely apathetic press tour and the early, rubbernecking critical reviews, confirmed what many had already suspected about this latest Sony-Marvel endeavor: that this movie was trash from the IP conveyor belt.
Madame Web is not a good movie. One could go so far as to say it’s a very bad movie, and bad movies are a dime a dozen. There have already been plenty in 2024 alone, movies that were honestly more disappointing than Madame Web, in part because they usually carried some expectation of decency. Leaving the theater after Madame Web, however, I knew that the critics were right; the movie was objectively bad, in that it was objectively poorly assembled. But it is the confluence of so many different, unique kinds of bad that it adds up to something, if not good, kind of great. In fact, when I look back at the experience of watching it, I, without a hint of irony, loved it.
Madame Web follows the story of Cassandra Webb (Johnson), Peter Parker’s uncle’s clairvoyant coworker who was born in a temple of spider-people in the Amazon where her mother was conducting research. Her gift is apparently activated when she falls off a bridge in Queens as an adult, and she uses it to protect three teenage girls from Ezekiel, a rich, consistently shoeless man who seeks to kill them because he has dreams of them killing him. Cassandra twice accomplishes this by running people over with a car. Sometimes this car is a stolen taxi, that Cassandra snags early in the film and continues to drive unrestrained for the rest of the runtime—even after a multi-day trip to Peru, during which she apparently leaves the stolen car at the airport. These are merely the script issues, and her web connects much more. Technically and visually speaking, Madame Web is also a mess. Ezekiel’s dialogue seems almost entirely dubbed-in after the fact, and rarely does it sync up with the movement of his mouth. In one scene, Cassie drives her stolen taxi under a poorly-rendered billboard for Beyoncé’s Dangerously In Love album, if only to remind us that we’re in 2003.
Some of these technical deficiencies had made it into the press before the movie actually opened, and entering the theater, I was prepared for a Cats-style fiasco. The 2019 Broadway musical adaptation was, like Madame Web, notorious upon the release of its trailer. In Cats, it was the shockingly poor CGI renderings of the titular cats that unsettled. But as a film, once the eye adjusts to the disturbing, uncanny (uncatty?) valley, it becomes boring; you’re left with two-plus hours of maudlin showtunes. Dear Evan Hanson fell victim to a similar fate; sure, Ben Platt looks like a freak in the film, but one freaky-looking actor does not a movie make. If Madame Web had been an otherwise normal superhero flick with an apathetic lead or a poorly-dubbed villain, it would have gotten old quickly. We need the scenes of her rescuing teen girls, then dumping them alone in the woods, then crashing her car through a rural diner to save them again.
But Madame Web is not Cats, at least in the sense that it has what some might call a plot, and my enjoyment of it is largely unironic. And because that plot is so wacky, my next impulse was to slot it into the realm of misunderstood masterpiece, the Razzie winner that gets critically reappraised 25 years later. But Madame Web isn’t Showgirls either. For better or worse, there is no debate that Showgirls is the completed vision of an auteur. In the 2019 documentary You Don’t Nomi, which explores the film’s infamy and cult status, critic Adam Nayman makes the case that while some see Showgirls as a piece of shit and others see a masterpiece, the truth is that Showgirls is a masterpiece of shit. Madame Web is undeniably a piece of shit in myriad ways, there’s no case to be made that it’s a masterpiece—it’s just too incomplete. The moments of greatness are transcendent in the way a great improv scene might be: Despite it all, the pieces, temporarily, fell into place.
Of course, the so-bad-it’s-good spectrum doesn’t simply run from Cats to Showgirls, and there are 100 other movies that could be included alongside them and Madame Web. But what unites these three is camp—a term that has been used to death but is actually relevant here. The simplest (and arguably best) definition of pure camp is failed sincerity—the fact that director S.J. Clarkson seemingly didn’t set out to make a parody of superhero movies separates the naï ve camp of Madame Web from the intentional camp of, say, The People’s Joker. But in both cases there is some kind of queer sensibility; explicit in the case of The People’s Joker, sublimated in Madame Web via the coven of female spider-women and via Dakota Johnson’s whole deal that, at least anecdotally, gay guys on Twitter eat right up.
Camp is an element, but that still isn’t all of what’s at play here. The enjoyment of Madame Web is genuine, but it’s kind of a schadenfreudian enjoyment derived from this specific cultural moment. Were it not for the superhero movie industrial complex, the already-faltering status of Marvel post-Endgame, and the monopolization of movie theaters by Disney—the kind of monopolization that makes it so even Quentin Tarantino can struggle to get his movies on screens—it’s doubtful the reaction to Madame Web would be this strong, or its failure this sweet. Sure, both The Marvels and Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania underperformed, but we largely moved on without the rubbernecking or turning the movies into punchlines.
But Madame Web is a perfect storm, optimized to be a camel-back-breaking straw. It’s not technically in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a Sony movie, so those with a vested interest in the MCU’s success have no problem throwing it totally under the bus. For those of us who are maybe more aligned with the Martin Scorseses of the world, it becomes the thing to point to as proof that we’re right. But whether through a genuinely subversive vision, weaponized incompetence, or just sheer dumb luck, Madame Web is also the most I’ve enjoyed a superhero movie in years. I grew up watching the Adam West-led Batman series with my parents. I like my superhero content cheap and dumb, stuffed with flimsy logic and bad wigs. The final product ends up being a (probably inadvertent) indictment of movies made by corporate committee and an incredible amount of fun. Madame Web is a feature-length 30 Rock cutaway gag.
So where does that leave us? How do we connect an unintentional corporate satire, a slice of naïve camp, a technically disastrous piece of shit, and an illogically fun superhero movie? With a web, of course—one that can connect them all. Madame Web is not on the existing spectrum of bad movies, but it invents a web all its own, one that could only exist at this specific moment in time. It’s a near tragedy that the end of the movie clearly sets up sequels for Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O’Connor’s assorted spider-girls. Not because I wouldn’t gladly watch three more of these movies, but because we couldn’t remake Madame Web if we tried. In fact, trying would actually make it bad.
78 Comments
This kind of discounts how it is exactly like other bad movies. Poor writing, zero common sense, bland characters, etc. etc.
But have you considered that it may be
lol “zero common sense” what does this mean
Not that anyone cares… but. Spoilers. Why would her mom go to the Amazon to work while pregnant? I don’t think any research expedition would take that liability.Why would she drop the girls off in the middle of the woods instead of say, at a police station? The girls are fully aware of the threat to them, but decide to go for dinner and dancing at a local diner?Why did the police blame Cassie instead of Ezekiel again?How do the girls get their powers? I cannot wait for the nonexistent sequels to offer an actual origin story. Cassie goes to Peru and back to NY in the space of what seems like 5 minutes. What was the significance of the letter “S” in her visions exactly? Didn’t Ezekiel get taken out by the “P”?These and several more plot holes show a lack of understanding how humans actually act in different situations. The characters lack even the most basic level of common sense. Zero common sense.
Well, the first and second questions at least are answered by the film. The mom is on the expedition because she’s leading it and gets to decide whether or not to hire herself. Cassie can’t take the girls to the police because she is herself wanted for murder by the police.I’m not saying these are smart answers, but they’re not mysteries either.
The first question’s addressed directly in the movie itself, no? Cassie had some sort of blood abnormality that her mom was trying to treat, and Cassie grew up not knowing this because the spider-water-birth had cured her?But man, dead to rights on the Pepsi sign snafu. I hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
So you ignore most of the examples and give half-assed answers for 2 of them. I’m guessing they don’t have very good medical facilities in the middle of the Amazonian jungle. She’s putting herself and her baby in direct risk to prevent a different risk? Huh?She could literally drop them off 1/2 a block from a cop shop. Why are you trying to convince me this movie’s characters or writers use common sense? Dakota, is that you?I rest my case.
Lol what a tool.
bro never watched a movie before lol. the letter nitpick sent me to another dimension.Again this movie is bad, but the things you point out are all deeply weird. Getting caught up in the logistics of this movie is so funny and misguided
S.J. Clarkson, that’s you isn’t it? Nobody else would take this garbage so seriously. I’m sorry, honey, you aren’t gonna get any more work directing…
bro u never watched a Cinemasins before lol.
Trying to hold this up as “camp” always seemed like try hard. It’s lazy, uninspired, and just outright poorly made in a lot of spots. Camp requires intentionality. It’s okay to enjoy shitty things without needing to justify it, that’s why McDonald’s is still in business.
Good camp is actually hard to pull off, shitty movies with low effort scripts are not camp, they’re shitty movies with low effort scripts.I’ve seen Rocky Horror Picture Show and you, Madame Web, are no Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Madame Web is much more a Shock Treatment than a Rocky Horror Picture Show.Sorry, that was mean.
But fair.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: doing something bad “ironically” is still fucking doing it. They want camp? This is the OG cinematic camp:
But it has “queer sensibilities” because…it has a cast featuring women, and uhhhh some gay people seem to like Dakota Johnson? Queer!
A lot of the attempts I saw at “ironic excitement” in the lead up to this were just “find and replace” copies of the Morbius memes from some 18 months prior. It felt a bit desperate.
“Camp requires intentionality”
By whose definition? Sontag made the distinction between “naïve camp” and “deliberate camp” as the writer seems to do here.
But naive camp is people who made it did not know it was terrible. I think the evidence is in here (just look at how Dakata Johnson practically ran from this in interviews) that they knew it was terrible when made. They were just in we were paid mode and bit the bullet.
lmao sir you do not understand camp even a little bit. and thanks for that dumb mcdonalds jab to define what you’re all about
Yeah, the effort to assert that the movie has some kind of “queer sensibility” seems like a big stretch. It’s OK for the gay community to like a so-bad-it’s-good movie in the same way everyone else does. There’s no need to assert they appreciate it in some different way.Also, while some parts of Madame Web may well be campy, Dakota Johnson’s bored underacting — the quality Gillis asserts the gay community is drawn to — is the opposite of camp.
Venom was campy but Madame Web definitely not. Why can’t Sony made a spin off of character from Spider-man into/across the Spiderverse instead of this garbage.
We know that Sony has the resources to make not Spider-Man Spidey movies. We know they can make them bad. Do they have the moxie to make the sure fire lollapalooza that a Turner D. Century production would be?Give the people what they deserve! Make Turner D. Century the celluloid legend that is his inevitable destiny!
Godspeed on your righteous quest
I salute your devotion to willing a Turner D. Century movie into existence, but I truly fear the impact it would have if it ever happened. The End Wokeness crowd would use it to propel their efforts to undo decades of social progress.
There will always be people stupid enough to laugh with the Archie Bunker type characters because they agree with what they are saying. We can’t let these idiots self censor us from mocking them. The artistic feat here is to make racist, reactionary characters as absurd and psychotic as their terrible ideas.
Am I the only one who thinks a character like Turner D Century is oddly plausible? Like, if we take as a reality a world where superpowers and advanced technology are fairly easy to acquire, I can imagine all sorts of weirdos deciding their niche interest is actually a cause worth championing if they had access to enough power to enforce it. Okay, turn of the century social mores is perhaps a bit of a stretch, but I can picture all sorts of “family values” themed supervillains terrorising the world.
Why not?Pat Robertson and Elon Musk are real, live (Pat is now thankfully dead) Bond villains. Turner D. Century isn’t much of a stretch.
So where does that leave us? How do we connect an unintentional corporate satire, a slice of naïve camp, a technically disastrous piece of shit, and an illogically fun superhero movie? With a web, of course—one that can connect them all. I mean, come on.
Some people use English degrees for good, some people use them for…well, this kind of thing.
With the minimal power of an English degree comes at least some responsibility.
And with that glorious sentence completed, the author set down their pencil and imagined Miss Shields writing ‘A+ A+ A+ A+ A+ A+…’ on the chalkboard.
why are the new avclub comments no fun
I always knew that we would get Madame Web reevaluation think pieces. I just didn’t expect we would get them this soon.
Hey at least it’s not an article about a Tweet, an episode recap masquerading as a review, or a slideshow!
My thoughts exactly! This article felt more like classic AV Club than the clickbait hot takes we’ve been getting (and kind of made me want to watch Madame Web). So I’m not complaining.
I agree. I’ll take weird, overthought takes any day over celebrity gossip lifted entirely from another site.
Man, the evidence is stacking up it that really was that cunt Spanfeller who fucked things, a man who’s clearly the type who who wears business shirts on his day off around the house.
It seems precisely like something Nathan Rabin would write.Looks like it’s halfway between Fiasco and Secret Success.
Zag!
Zug zug!
More work?
But whether through a genuinely subversive vision, weaponized incompetence, or just sheer dumb luck(My emphasis.) I think you just mean “incompetence”. How exactly is it being weaponized here?
It’s actually a memetic virus, people’s heads will be exploding any second now…
I think the author meant “weaponized incontinence”
Now that sounds shitty.
Ben Platt looks like a freak in the film, but one freaky-looking actor does not a movie make.No one ever accused one freaky-looking actor of being a movie.
One of the (many, many, many, many) annoying aspects of the social media age is this tendency of trying to meme so-bad-they’re-good movies into existence. Sometimes (which is to say 99% of the time) shitty movies are just shitty, for entirely predictable and unremarkable reasons, no matter how much you try to delude yourself into thinking you’re having fun.
It’s the opposite – social media amplifies niche opinions until they seem like consensus, because actual consensus is boring. Watching shitty movies isn’t automatically fun or interesting, but sticking to “good” entertainment is how people end up with boring shit like Taylor Swift or football or the MCU.
STFU Drew. This isn’t camp. Camp is Sharknado. Stop trying to excuse terrible directing, editing, camera work, writing, and pretty much everything that had to do with making this peice of shit as camp. It’s a bad fucking movie and they thought they were making a good movie, period.
It’s a bad fucking movie and they thought they were making a good movie, period.That’s actual camp. Deliberate camp is rarely as fun as inadvertent camp which is why, say, Ed Wood’s oeuvre is many times more entertaining than all the Sharnadoes put together.
Nah, this ain’t camp — either intentionally (e.g., John Waters) or unintentionally (e.g., Ed Wood) — it’s just bleh.
But in both cases there is some kind of queer sensibility; explicit in the case of The People’s Joker, sublimated in Madame Web via the coven of female spider-women and via Dakota Johnson’s whole deal that, at least anecdotally, gay guys on Twitter eat right up. Pretty wild claim we’re just going to drop at the end of a paragraph and never follow up on.
“This is a terrible film, but if I say the gays like it then I can play off criticism of this article as homophobia. The marginalised make the best human shields.”
If you’re going to write an article that’s arguing some kind of point, you can’t just drop the phrase “whole deal” in there and expect people to know what you’re talking about. You have to provide at least a little explanation.
Low-Hanging Content
“Ben Platt looks like a freak in the film, but one freaky-looking actor does not a movie make” is a boffo line. Well done.
This article struck a chord with me. I was expecting it to be rubbish from the reviews, but I’m not a superhero fanboy nor a hater, so expected a passable hour and a half which would probably be a little bit shit.I just didn’t anticipate how weird it would be. The bizarre, stilted dialogue, the way no 2 human beings seems to connect with a single normal conversation. The awkward attempts at comedy. Add to that, Dakto Johnson’s generally offbeat cadence and way of answering questions in interviews – famous parents obviously, so she’s probably a bit affected there.
It genuinely reminded me of The Room in places. From the film, to the press tour, just utterly strange all round. And probably worth watching just for that.
Wow. I found your comment much more informative than the article. Thank you.
You didn’t even diss me for accidentally typing “Dakto Johnson”.
“Dakto Johnson” is what George Lucas would have named her anyway.
Exactly lol, I am usually pretty critical of “so bad its good’ movies just being bad but this has the x factor of being so odd it needs to be seen to be believed. Dakota Johnson is actually doing something intentional I think though it’s totally wrong for the movie
Probably the first half an hour or so needs to be seen to be believed, then you slowly get used to the novelty of it, then you look at your watch and realise there’s about a fucking hour more of it, and get a bit depressed. It’s also like The Room in that way.Oh I almost forgot one of the main hooks of the movie – the ability to perform CPR. I’m a medic, and Dakota Johnson’s absolutely limp, bored, incorrect attempt at resus, on ALL occasions, made me piss myself. They were trying to make a little statement with it, how everyone should learn… and then had Dakota do it completely wrong.
“Madame Web follows the story of Cassandra Webb”
I agree with everything the author said and I’ll add this: the foundational plot of the movie is solid. It’s a Terminator riff where they’re being chased by a Spider-Man Terminator. That’s so great and small!
as quoted elsewhere, it is a new future camp classic. and i totally agree. it’s so bad, it’s good.i laughed my head off at Dakota’s attempt at the dialogue. so funny.highly recommend sticking it on, on a Friday or Saturday night.
I’m glad to see this. After all the jokes and negative press, I watched the movie anyway with the lowest of expectations. For the entirety of the film, I was entertained. Not blown away, but pleasantly surprised with it. Sometimes it seems like a bandwagon has to be jumped on just to preserve your credibility (whatever that cred may be). Perhaps this method of going into a movie knowing ahead of time that it was a critical and financial bomb (and despite news about its star) also helped me enjoy The Flash. I mean, it had Michael Keaton as Batman… I was going to watch it regardless!
“Madame Web is undeniably a piece of shit in myriad ways, there’s no case to be made that it’s a masterpiece—it’s just too incomplete. The moments of greatness are transcendent in the way a great improv scene might be: Despite it all, the pieces, temporarily, fell into place.”is this one of those essays written in the style of the thing it’s critiquing?
While that exact line isn’t in the movie, a version of it lives in it. What? I was feeling bad about myself and wanted to hurt myself further.
A spiderman movie with no spiderman. A bunch of ladies with little to no powers. Madame Web actually kills a helicopter by waving it in to save them and then all aboard are killed. Deflects a bomb under another car and kills others instead. Madame Web is a murderer. Plus they had to emasculate Uncle Ben by showing she can do the job better than him. Lack of a coherent story and worse editing than Wonder Woman 1984. Guess they have money to burn. Dakota Johnson fired her agent after filming, that says it all.
I have been carping about the end of the AV Club’s glory days as much as anyone, but I will say here that Drew Gillis is right! This is good in the same way that Ghost Rider 2: Spirit of Vengeance was good. Meaning, of course, that it’s not…but having just watched it, I swear to God, you get the same sense of joy here that you do at seeing Idris Elba, bemused and blinking, photoshopped in the middle of a tree’s foliage.Also, S.J. Clarkson has been a solid TV director for decades and there are individual scenes here (e.g. where she opens the window for the bird and realizes she can change the future) that just fucking work. I think if you triple the budget on this thing, hire a competent screenwriter, and don’t do a last minute CGI overwrite from the 90s to the 2000s, you get a pretty good movie….but it’s better this way.
‘”The simplest (and arguably best) definition of pure camp is failed sincerity—the fact that director S.J. Clarkson seemingly didn’t set out to make a parody of superhero movies separates the naï ve camp of Madame Web from the intentional camp of, say, The People’s Joker. But in both cases there is some kind of queer sensibility; explicit in the case of The People’s Joker, sublimated in Madame Web via the coven of female spider-women and via Dakota Johnson’s whole deal that, at least anecdotally, gay guys on Twitter eat right up.”’It’s here that I’m reminded that art (including films) is subjective. You dear reviewer may very well be reading what you want into it. It in fact may not be queer-coded.
…but I don’t have a neuromuscular disorder…
Its just crap.They took a bad concept, a worse script, a terrible actress and handed it to an unqualified director.Crap be crap.
MADAME WEBB is not a GOOD movie but it is an ENTERTAINING one, even though it’s trying really hard not to be this too (Grand Canyon-size plot holes, the aforementioned dubbing, the overall laziness of the script). For example, why does Ezekiel intend to stroll onto a train full of witnesses to murder three girls, but once he’s thwarted, THAT’s when he decides to wear the Evil Spider-Man suit, and therefore remain anonymous?Also, what’s he been doing for the last 30(!) years with his Evil Spider-Man powers? Fuck all, apparently.
You don’t know what kind of bad I thought it was so quit acting like you do, headline.