'Madame Web' Reviewed: I Came (to Peru), I Saw (Zosia Mamet), I Dakota Johnson'd
And yes, the spiders were worth it, mom.
At one point in Madame Web, actress Dakota Johnson, who plays the titular Cassie Webb (she got the “b” cut off — reference), turns to her cat (a cat I fully thought might start talking) and says, “Us strays need to stick together.” A majority of the sold-out theater I was in attendance at burst into fits of laughter as though she’d just delivered the perfect zinger. She hadn’t. In true Cassie fashion, she hadn’t done much at all. Later in the film, a child hands Cassie a drawing they’ve made. “I can’t even fold it,” she says with Rita Rudner-level deadpan. She must be joking! Turns out, she’s not. At the end of the film — the final line, in fact — Cassie says (via voiceover), "You know the best thing about the future? It hasn't happened yet.” In that moment, my mind teleported me to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, specifically when Margot Robbie’s character asks, “Have you ever thought about dying?”
In 2022, Reese Witherspoon told us “women’s stories matter… they just matter.” While I don’t disagree on principal, I’m not sold on Cassie Webb’s. There was a moment early on where we made a split-second but crucial decision in how we, a newly formed collective, were going to watch this film. It was as though we were handed a menu and instead of “suspense thriller” we selected “broad comedy.” And with the goal of broad comedy being tons of laughs, I’d say this film delivered big!
There’s without question a “choose your own adventure” nature to this film, a film that is not very good in the conventional sense of goodness, but also invites willing audiences (me among them) to find a different way to enjoy the film. One thing about Madame Web: It’s not as bad as they’re saying. “Guy working at the theater saw I was seeing Madame Web and said ‘try to enjoy it,’” reads a viral tweet about the film. “Madame Web got my brain to such a weird place that my Oura ring thought I was asleep,” claims another. “I see this film as a threat to international security,” says a viral TikTok about the film.
Critics, too, were lavishing in the opportunity to eviscerate. “To say that Johnson in particular phoned this performance in would be an insult to Alexander Graham Bell,” wrote David Sims for the Atlantic. “God-awful is too weak a word,” declared Peter Travers. In a particularly scathing one, the Times UK’s Kevin Maher wrote that the film “represents the death of the superhero genre, the burning of the superhero genre to the ground and then the returning in the middle of the night to piss on the superhero genre’s ashes.”
But there’s also a category of Madame Web review that appreciates the artistry of awfulness. “Protect Bad Cinema,” reads a viral tweet about the film. “Madame Web being so bad that it’s actually getting people to the theater and becoming a successful cult classic is my Roman Empire,” reads another. “It’s a travesty, a disaster, a blight on the history of superheroes and cinema itself,” wrote Slate’s Sam Adams, before adding, “I enjoyed the hell out of it.”
In some instances, Johnson’s laugh-inducing turn as a clairvoyant FDNY paramedic (who’s high-key very bad at her job; she puts more lives in danger via her reckless driving than she does save them) was heralded. Hunter Harris called the performance “funnily postmodern.”
TL; DR: As Vulture’s Alison Willmore shrewdly pointed out in her review, “It’s the kind of bad movie that is difficult to describe without making it sound awesome.”
And while I certainly have an appreciation, if not an appetite, for this sort of culture (see: Jennifer Lopez’s This Is Me... Now as another recent example of this), I do think we need to start to recognize our tendency to push that which is simply not very good into a space of being abysmal in an attempt to maximize the polarity between bomb and iconography. See, I reserve the latter designation for films that are attempting to be or say more than this one. This film had a low bar to clear. It didn’t clear it! But it’s not God-awful. It’s just awful. And that discernment is imperative, at least to me.
Now onto the review!