Make no mistake. Sony’s latest attempt at a Spider-Man spinoff, Madame Web, is bad. Pretty much everything about it is bad: the script, the acting, the cinematography, and more. But, in our mind, one thing towers over the rest. The king of all things Bad-ame Web. But, to talk about it, we have to dive into spoilers.
The main narrative drive of Madame Web stems from the bad guy Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim) having visions of his death. In his dream, which he has every night, he envisions three masked superheroes killing him. And so, instead of using his considerable resources and power for good, he decides to use those resources to find and kill these three women so they don’t kill him first. Ideally, he’ll track them down before they even get powers in the first place.
Ezekiel uses his memory to come up with accurate facial descriptions of the women, even though they’re wearing masks, and steals some high-tech NSA software that’s able to find them wherever they are. All of this is very silly and bad, but it’s merely set up for the worst part.
At this point the audience knows, and Ezekiel knows, the three strangers— Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Mattie (Celeste O’Connor), and Anya (Isabela Merced)—are going to become Spider-Women. We know it. We see it. We see their suits, their powers, and because we know and see those things, we expect the movie to get there. It’s a very, very reasonable assumption that the film you are watching will include these characters getting their powers and costumes because it’s so crucial to the whole narrative. It’ll probably be in the last scene of the movie, but surely it’ll happen.
About halfway through the movie though, I started to get worried. Things move very slowly. The girls are hiding. The girls are scared. The girls are saved. At one point I thought “Is this movie three hours long? Because they have a lot more ground to cover.” How can the story I’m watching possibly get to the point of these confused characters becoming awesome Spider-Women?
The answer is… it doesn’t. The women never become superheroes. They never get powers. They never put on supersuits. In fact, they don’t really change at all, except by becoming friends in the end. The only thing that comes close is, over the end credits, we see images of the characters in the suits again—but it never happens in the story.
[As an aside—and this doesn’t matter as much, because it’s not in the text of the film—but the Madame Web marketing, such as that image at the top of this article, focuses heavily on all the characters in the supersuits. Trailers, character posters, all of it is them in costumes. So, on top of all this, if you watched a trailer and went to see the movie expecting to see that, you were duped.]
The oddest thing about all this is that the movie keeps teasing it. We keep seeing visions of the dream. The entire plot is about stopping this event from happening. And, once the women start hanging out with Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson) we assume she’ll find some way to give them powers. Or they’ll get the powers in some action triggered by being around her. Alas, nope. Never happens. The girls survive, Ezekiel dies, and, since none of them have a good home life, they sort of adopt Cassie as their pseudo-big sister figure. Maybe the rest will happen in Madame Web 2.
So basically, the movie is lying to you. It’s making you think these girls are going to get powers and become heroes, only they never do. Which might have been okay if the film had anything else remotely satisfying happen but it does not. That even extends to the title character. Cassie has powers throughout the movie but she doesn’t become the full “Madame Web” until she’s blinded by a firework that hits her underwater. Water would’ve doused the firework, by the way. But it doesn’t and it happens so quickly and after the fact, it feels like it was tacked on because someone forgot. [Note: After publication, X user @DeuxExCinema alerted me that fireworks can go off underwater so, at least the movie got that right.]
In the end, I was disappointed that Madame Web was bad. Yes, that was the most likely outcome looking at the bulk of Sony’s Spider-Man spinoffs, but you always go into a movie hoping for the best. So I can get over it being bad. What I can’t get over is a movie very clearly setting up expectations, teasing them throughout the movie, and then not delivering. That’s messed up. That’s unforgivable. Because now, with the chilly reception Madame Web is getting, odds are we’ll never get to see those characters on screen again. Which is a shame because it’s a movie I’d like to see. Unfortunately, it’s a movie I thought I was already seeing.
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