You know that we’ve been through some bad movies here on No But Listen, some really dreadful ones, some complete and utter stinkers. But, friends, I don’t think I have seen anything quite as sumptuously, uniquely, unfathomably dreadful as Madame Web, and I urgently need to talk to someone about it.
Madame Web, directed by SJ Clarkson, follows Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson), a New York paramedic who begins having psychic visions after a near-death experience, and finds herself caught up in protecting three teenage girls after they’re targeted by a murderous villain Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim, the lead of the absolutely seminally brilliant A Prophet, which you urgently need to see if you haven’t already) determined to kill them off before they come into the powers he’s sure will end up killing him.
Usually, when we talk about bad movies, we’re talking about specific aspects of the film that didn’t work: the casting, the direction, the writing, the story, the characters. But with Madame Web, it goes beyond that. It’s not that there are some parts of this that don’t work, and that’s enough to upend the whole thing: it’s that the entire movie feels like a direct and sustained decision to make the worst choices possible at every turn, and this bizarre cautionary tale is the result.
I mean, yes, there are a few obvious things that stand out as being somewhat worse than everything else. For reasons I literally cannot fathom, it sounds like almost all of Rahim’s dialogue was re-recorded and inserted post-shooting, so every time he appears on-screen, he sounds like he’s coming at you from inside an AirPod; he spends the movie cursing out the teenage girls for “ruining everything he’s worked for”, and the only thing we actually see him having dominion over is a quite-nice apartment with Zosia Mamet (indefensibly awful, with three more stainless steel jewellery pieces draped on her every time she makes an appearance) in it.
Dakota Johnson, though an impossibly charming presence in real life, remains one of the worst performers I’ve ever seen have such a popular career; where Cassie is meant to come across as a socially-awkward but well-meaning loner, she reads as an immature Not-Like-Other-Girls nightmare, with Johnson unable to imbue her with the charm she needs to pull off this character. The flash-forward sequences that make up the majority of Cassie’s powers are confusing and ugly, twenty Final Destination visions piled on top of each other and then rewound into complete pointlessness within seconds.
But it’s not just the big, obvious stuff. No, it’s everything, really and truly. Loves, I honestly don’t even know where to start with this one. Any angle from which you approach this movie, you’re slamming directly into a concrete wall of sheer incompetence. Why is Adam Scott playing a pre-Peter Uncle Ben when he’s older than some of the actors who played him when he died? Why is Sydney Sweeney running around New York dressed like a porn parody of a teenage schoolgirl, thigh-high stockings and all? Why does the action feature so many tiny camera push-ins usually reserved for underlining an awkward moment in a comedy mockumentary? Why does everyone talk like they’re reading from the first draft of an AI-generated found family fanfiction? Why is Ezekiel barefoot so much of the time? Why does Cassie get away with stealing a cab from an innocent bystander and then taking an international trip with no repercussions twenty minutes later? Was Emma Roberts even informed she was in this movie?
To watch Madame Web is to be pummelled with questions the movie has no interest in answering or even diverting you from. I’m all for a bit of suspension of disbelief, but the logical leaps are impossible to ignore, the bizarre plot holes so gaping you could drive a bus through them, the writing and performances so risibly, comically bad it’s hard to believe anyone involved has seen a film, let alone worked on one before. It’s like someone overheard a conversation about the concept of moviemaking from three rooms away and tried to recreate that in a single afternoon after a three-cocktail lunch.
This review really can’t capture just how jaw-droppingly incompetent this is from every angle; it’s bad in ways you didn’t even know movies could be bad in. I think Madame Web will go down as the true nadir of superhero cinema, and rightly so – but I also can’t deny that I was pretty entertained by it, in terms of how dreadful it turned out to be, probably because I’m not particularly precious about or invested in the genre. I can’t recommend it, but if, like me, you are not immune to the lure of a truly bad movie, it’s sort of a good time. It’s outstanding in the field of awfulness, and that, I suppose, is something. If you squint.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Hollywood Reporter)
No But Listen 