A paramedic whose mom was in the Amazon researching spiders right before she died has to save three teenage girls from a man intent on killing them
But for an editorial swerve, Madame Web could have been Hamlet. By which I mean cursed with a line that has the audience on such tenterhooks waiting for it they almost miss the rest. In the end we don’t actually get to hear the much-mocked quote from the trailer – “Ezekiel Sims; he was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died” – though we do get to see mom with him in the Amazon while researching spiders right before she died.
Cassie Webb’s mum does then die in the Amazon, in 1973, after being bitten by a massive spider and then immediately giving birth to a baby. Oops I mean being bitten by a spider and then giving birth to a massive baby.
30 Years later, Cassie has grown into a grumpy paramedic with only one jacket, though this is 2003 before fast fashion really hits. She has a pet cat which is even bigger than she was as a baby, a sweet apartment no one more junior than a plastic surgeon could now afford, and excellent driving skills, which also seem to have fallen by the wayside in the intervening 20 years.
An unexpected dip in the river in a crashed car leaves her dead for several minutes, and, once reanimated, blessed/cursed with seeing the future; though her immediate superpower seems to be the ability to pop balloons remotely while eating a sausage on a stick. And, well, it’s not very cinematic but she could have made a fortune at kids’ birthday parties if she’d just stuck to that.
I had heard Madame Web was bad. Then that it was terrible. Eventually it was discovered, perhaps through the “madness of crowds”, that Madame Web was in fact the worst bad film ever ever made. Having realised when trying to review Shark Exorcist that this website does not support awarding a movie anything less than one star, I was now worried I’d have to contact my site developer and ask him to look into it again, so I was extremely relieved that Madame Web genuinely deserved a whole two stars, and I didn’t even have to award a consolation star for the cat.
Yes Shark Exorcist, you retain your crown as worst film I have ever seen, demonic nuns and all. Madame Web is however bookended by scenes of such dreadful ridiculousness, and such appalling acting, that if you fell asleep into your popcorn in the middle you might indeed think it was a bona fide stinker.
Even the middle bit, while not terrible, never reaches any great heights. Actually the whole film feels like a two hour pilot for a superhero series aimed at smallish children. Not much happens, and what does happen we tend to see twice, as a good chunk is Cassie seeing the future, then living through it in an attempt to stop it. (In Greek mythology Cassandra was cursed by Apollo to see the future, but for no one to believe her.)
Taking some time out to recover from the weird stuff that starts happening to her, Cassie starts having premonitions on a train, soon realising they involve three disparate teenage girls she then has to save from the clutches of a scuttlesome Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim).
Ezekiel too has been beset by glimpses of the future. His life since he stole Cassie’s mom’s Special Amazon Spider has been destroyed by endless visions in which he is killed by three young spider-women. The only way to save himself is to kill them first, and he is using his presumably spider-based fortune to track any sighting of them around the world.
The dialogue is often awful, and the movie moves forward in fits, starts and jerks, like they suddenly realised they need to explain something or get us somewhere. Cassie’s trip to Peru to reconnect with her dead mum is embarrassing, like a wellness therapy mini-break sold to wealthy Guardian readers. Though it’s not as embarrassing as Ezekiel Sims, a villain who makes Greta Thunberg look like Thanos. Crawling along ceilings and down walls he reminded me of those tiny sticky rubber figures – so beloved of British mums when tasked with filling 30 party bags for under a quid each – that “walk” head over heels down the window.
Still, while Dakota Johnson is miscast (her style of acting just doesn’t work when you have to believe in an alternate universe, which generally seem more sincere than our own) I came to quite enjoy her deadpan delivery of Cassie’s general indifference to the world, whether doing entirely normal things or literally saving someone’s life.
The three young women she’s trying to save from Ezekiel’s black-spidersuited baddie – Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor), and Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced) – all have an existing connection to Cassie, and are, like the best teenagers, both perfectly nice and also extremely annoying; in this case mainly because they order a massive meal in a diner, putting themselves in huge danger, then don’t bother to eat the food. Literally every woman I know could be dining on a sinking Titanic in 1912 or picnicking on the sides of Vesuvius in 79AD and would resolutely gobble up every last crumb before leaving, so even in the weird world of superheroes that’s jumping the shark (exorcist).
Note: there are no mid-credit or end-credit scenes in Madame Web.
Read my spoilery article Madame Web Unravelled – including that ending
Watch the trailer for Madame Web: