Review

Like everyone else, I’ve got a bit of superhero fatigue. And this is from someone who was fully invested in the Marvel MCU experiment. Part of it is just general exhaustion with seeing similar stories over and over again, but a big part is also that recent movies haven’t been very good. I will absolutely defend all of the MCU movies of the Infinity Saga as being solid-to-excellent movies (well ok, maybe not Thor 2…that was kind of shit). Recent superhero movies from Disney/Marvel, Sony/Marvel, and WB/DC just haven’t risen to that level. So I had a pretty low bar of expectations going into this one. Sadly, Madame Web crashed right into it.

After a quick backstory involving her mother looking for spiders in the Peruvian Amazon and getting betrayed by her…I wanna say jungle bodyguard (?)…the story really opens by introducing us to Cassandra Webb (played by Dakota Johnson) as she goes about her life as an EMT. She starts getting visions of bad things happening, only for those events to play out as she saw them. Once this happens enough times for her to start to believe that she can actually see the future, it's time for her to begin to interact with our bad guy!

Tahar Rahim’s Ezekiel Sims. He came from nothing, and is now a bigshot something-or-other so he can’t go back. Let’s start trying to kill people!

That would be Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), not coincidentally the same guy who betrayed and killed Cassie’s mother at the beginning of the movie (but not before she was able to give birth to Cassie with the help of some random Peruvian spider-people). Ezekiel is now a successful, um…{checks notes}…person, aided by the powers he gained by taking the venom of the secret Peruvian spiders Cassie’s mother had discovered. When he starts seeing visions of his death at the hands of a group of costumed women, he decides that the life he’s built for himself is too valuable to lose, and decides to hunt down and kill the women.

This is without a doubt one of the worst villains in recent cinematic history. None of his reasons for anything he does are remotely clear, except perhaps a general feeling that he just doesn’t want to die at some unknown future date. But “I come from nothing!”, he keeps telling us in bad exposition, as some sort of justification for anything that he does. Anyway, he manages to recruit some random computer person to use NSA surveillance equipment he has stolen in order to find the women. Except that his visions are of the future, and so the women are actually all teenage girls.

Spoilers Ahead

Cassie and the girls. They seem just about as shocked at the stupid plot of this movie as I was.

The girls are Julia, Anya, and Mattie (played by Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O’Connor). This movie didn’t give these young actresses nearly enough to do. For most of the movie they’re just running away and, I guess, becoming friends. Sweeney has become one of the more charming young actresses in Hollywood lately, and I’ve believed for a while now that Merced has a lot more to offer than what she’s shown so far in her career. This is my first time seeing O’Connor, and she seems fine. I couldn’t tell because all the movie does is give them broad character archetypes (The sweet one! The smart one! The tough one!) and not much else.

What results are characters that are, sadly, just a bit boring. The visions of the future that Ezekiel has of the girls working together as a superhero team seem like it would make for a much more interesting movie and be a better use of the actresses talents.

All of the main characters come together on the subway where Cassie gets visions of the girls being attacked. So when Ezekiel arrives to do just that, she helps them get away. After a few random scenes of them being on the run, hiding out in the woods or whatever, Cassie decides she wants to learn more about her powers, and with the help of one of her mother’s old notebooks, she heads to Peru, leaving the girls with her EMT partner (Adam Scott) and his pregnant wife (Emma Roberts). In Peru, Cassie stumbles upon one of the surviving spider people who helped in her birth. He explains the bare minimum about the spider venom she received at her birth that gave Cassie her predictive powers, and conveniently mentions that when she figures out her powers she’ll even be able to be in more than one place at a time.

Back in New York, Roberts’ character goes into labour, and so it’s off to the hospital. The girls come along for the trip to the hospital purely for plot reasons. They’re obviously safer staying off the radar indoors, and it’s not like they’re 10 years old and need to be looked after. The movie already took great pains to explain to us that all three girls have essentially been on their own for a while. But this gets them outside long enough for Ezekiel’s tech person to spot them so he can attack once again. Luckily Cassie gets back just in time to rescue them by crashing an ambulance through a second story billboard into Ezekiel somehow despite the fact that she had been driving on the street only seconds earlier.

This sets up a final showdown where Ezekiel captures the girls and puts them in dangerous situations and tells Cassie “you can’t save them all”. But wait! She remembers what she was told in Peru about being able to be in more than one place at a time and thinks, “that sounds good, I’ll do that” despite never having actually used or figured out this power before. She saves the day and everyone lives happily, I suppose.

As you can probably tell, this movie is really stupid. Save your money. There’s no good reason to see it.

Cassie and the possibly future spiderwomen running away from the reviews of this movie.

5 Quick Hits

I can’t think of any logical reason that this movie was set in 2003. It made absolutely no difference to the story. Maybe the reason for this would have been made clear in some future sequel that might have existed in an alternative timeline where this movie was good and people went to see it, but in our world such a movie is unlikely to ever get made. So the only thing I’m left with is the guess that they set the movie in 2003 solely so they could get the Britney song “Toxic” into it, in the mistaken belief that characters can only listen to songs during the year in which they’re released.
Early in the movie Cassie steals a taxi as part of their initial escape from bad villain guy. She then conscientiously pries off the licence plate as part of a well thought out plan to hide their movements despite it being a fucking NYC taxi, and having about 20 other identifying numbers plastered all over it. She then proceeds to drive it around for almost the entirety of the movie until she upgrades by stealing a convenient ambulance.
Why the hell was Jill Hennessy in this movie? I realize that it’s not the 90s anymore, but her career can’t be doing that badly that she had to accept the nuanced and multi-layered role in this movie that was credited only as “Beautiful Woman”, can it? In her scene her “character” is apparently seduced by Ezekiel handing her a program at the symphony, only to go back to his place and get killed for her access to an NSA surveillance program. Oh, but I guess she also got to lie there in bed and listen to some of his bad exposition.
In another ham-fisted scene, Cassie is lying on her couch watching a TV broadcast of A Christmas Carol, just so she can listen to Scrooge question the Ghost of Christmas Future about whether or not he can change what he sees in his visions of what is to come. This despite it clearly being summertime over the course of the movie. Who the hell is watching A Christmas Carol in the summer?
There are 4 credited screenwriters for this movie, and 3 “story by” credits, and yet this still seems like it’s the first draft of a movie, one where the creators haven’t yet given much thought to the details or explanations for the story they’re trying to tell. I’m not sure how this happened.