Madame Web review: Dakota Johnson can't spin much out of this Spidey-adjacent project

Madame Web is a laughable affair. Intentionally so, at times. But for much of its two-hour runtime, the laughs come at the expense of the arguably capable work being put in by its charming lead, and the ridiculous dialogue she’s reduced to uttering with the best semblance of a straight face. To Dakota Johnson’s credit, she emerges if not unscathed, at least having had a fun enough time playing the film’s titular character. Alas, that’s not enough to save Sony’s ill-conceived attempt at broadening its Spidey-verse.

Johnson stars as Cassandra “Cassie” Webb (yes, really; this movie is nothing if not thick with its cues), a most aloof young woman who sounds and behaves like a Californian and not, of course, a New York City EMT working the streets in 2003 after making her way out of the foster system. Cassie doesn’t know (though we do, thanks to a listless opening prologue) that she’s the daughter of a dogged scientist. One who’d decided to travel all the way to Peru while eight months pregnant in search of a mythic spider whose venom could potentially heal all sorts of ailments. She’s killed, though, and her untimely demise (are there any other kind in these stories?) comes because she’s double-crossed by a man named Ezekiel, who shoots her after securing said spider for himself (why remains a mystery the film seems uninterested in exploring).

And so, Cassie is born with the help of Las Arañas, a group of super-powered beings who can climb treetops and have a sixth sense about them (you might call them spider-men) along with a bite from one of the famed spiders her mother had long been searching for. And then, presumably, she’s shipped back as an infant to New York City, though not before an elder Spider-folk says she’ll eventually come back and he’ll be there to help her. Odd to thing to say to a baby, but that’s the least odd part of this entire screenplay.

That preamble, clunky and ripped straight out of a vintage pulpy B-level (maybe C-level) comic book character’s origin story feels especially extraneous when, set in 2003, the entirety of Madame Web feels like mere prologue. Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim, who may well have had every single utterances dubbed with the worst ADR you’ve seen on a big-budget blockbuster) is awakened every day since he superpowered himself with his stolen spider by one constant dream. In this dream, three young women in different-looking Spidey suits that look straight out of the Schumacher Batman era of comic book costuming, attack him at his lavish apartment and kill him. He’s been having this dream daily: he knows when and how he’ll die. And he’d rather not, obviously. So why not hijack the then novel technology used by the TSA to track these would be supes?

Which he does, though none of the girls have yet been bitten by spiders (radioactive or otherwise). In 2003, they’re just one-dimensional teenagers. One is shy and awkward but also knows Taekwondo (Sydney Sweeney’s Julia). One is a bit of a science geek and a math whiz and rightfully wary of the cops (Isabela Merced’s Anya). And one is spoiled and impulsive but good on her skateboard (Celeste O’Connor’s Mattie). If only Ezekiel can get to them before they grow into the heroes he sees in his vision he may … live a long and fruitful life devoted to …? Well, it’s unclear. He’s truly a villain just because. There’s very little motivation here for anything. Every scene and character is a cog in the machine that we call plot, with little rhyme or reason, let alone character consistency.

That applies to Cassie, as well, who finds her powers awakened after she falls into the river. When Cassie begins experiencing a time-looped world where some events repeat themselves, letting her possibly alter what’s to come, she realizes her mother’s adventures in the Amazon (looking decidedly un-Amazon on screen) may not have been as farfetched as she’d long believed. Hers are premonitions, she soon discovers. Or, as she eloquently puts it in one of the many pieces of dialogue that Johnson miraculously makes believable, even if that somehow makes the whole enterprise feel rather weightless: “I can see the future, kinda.”

It’s those visions that bring Cassie into the orbit of Ezekiel’s three targets and, despite hating pretty much all other people (save, perhaps, her co-worker Ben, played by Adam Scott in a much too thankless a role), Cassie is thrown into being a reluctant parental figure to these variously orphaned and endangered girls.

Wanting to be many things at once (a Madame Web origin story; a franchise starter for a trio of Spidey women; a Millennial/Gen Z odd couple/buddy comedy flick; a chance to witness Johnson’s knack for being above the material she’s in and somehow rising above it while clearly making it obvious we may find it risible), this S.J. Clarkson-directed dreck of a movie is not even bad enough to be enjoyable.

At the press screening I attended in New York City, there weren’t just audible groans of despair and sighs of discontent. There was outright cackling and many a “you’ve GOT to be kidding me!” yells peppered throughout a collective two-hour exercise in disdainful shock that this all made it onto the screen. Much of this was prompted by the dialogue, but also by the shaky and self-consciously deployed music video-like cinematography and the schlocky visual effects which make Madame Web look not too far from a CW show without, sadly, the winking sense of humor to pull off such a camp-adjacent sensibility (this is textbook failed self-seriousness).

If or when you find yourself seated for Madame Web (by choice I hope; though perhaps I may dissuade you from such a choice), you will be compelled to laugh. Not with the film—try as Johnson and her co-stars may—but at it. It’ll come from lines like “us strays have to stick together” (delivered to a cat but also, presumably, as a thesis for the film as a whole); and from bonkers action sequences (did you know the Pepsi Co. sign—its S and a P, in particular—plays a prominent role in its climax?) and sometimes from the sheer tonal whiplash of it all (the utter waste of a Britney needle drop for a teenage dance party turned toothless fight is utterly shameful).

This laughter will feel indicative of something larger, another nail in the coffin of the great era of comic book blockbusters of the 21st century, yes. But also of something bleaker. About how much harder it is, perhaps, to thread the line between sentimental earnestness (this is a film about mothering!) and sheer absurdity (did we mention the mythic Peruvian spiders?). What we’re all left with is a conveyor belt of story beats and IP milestones and coy winking reveals designed to whet our appetite for more without failing to make us care about any of what’s in front of us; the limit case of a way of making comic book adaptations that has truly run its course. Like Madame Web herself, the film is often so hurried or so preoccupied with what’s to come that it ignores what’s happening in the moment. It may explain why there’s no post-credit sequence, for who else would want to see a future vision of this world?

Madame Web opens in theaters on February 14