The three best words to describe Madame Web are bad, bad and bad. It’s horrible. I watched it with Boyfriend Know-It-All, and if you’re wondering why this review took so long, it’s because we didn’t want to waste our money seeing it in a theater. We’d seen the reviews. We gave it a shot anyway, knowing it was more than likely going to be bad, and it was absolutely horrible. There’s one line near the end where the two of us were laughing for maybe five minutes, and it was supposed to be the sweet part.
She Died Over a Spider
The movie opens in Peru in 1973 and gives you no context at all. A woman is looking for a spider. She says she needs it because it has mythical powers, and you find out much later it’s because her baby has some kind of bone and muscle disease. The guy with her, who turns out to be the villain, is agreeing with her about the powers, and she turns around and says, “But that’s an urban legend. I like to base my research in science, not legends, Mr. Sims.”
She finds the spider. He betrays her, shoots everyone, and holds her at gunpoint while she’s holding the jar. Dude, just give up the jar. Give up the spider. He shoots her and takes it anyway, so she died for nothing.
Then these spider people show up. The movie has a specific name for them and we forgot it, because you can’t say Spider-Man and you can’t say Spider-Woman. Their leader carries her dying body to a pool, another spider bites her on the chest, and he delivers the baby, which is just a plastic doll. And there are spiders everywhere in that sequence. She did not have to die over that one.
A Horrible Person in an Ambulance
It jumps to 2003. Dakota Johnson is Cassie, and she and Ben Parker are EMTs in Queens. Inside the first ten minutes every character in play gets introduced: Cassie, Sydney Sweeney as Julia, the girl from Instant Family, and the girl from Ghostbusters (watch that review, thank you). Super convenient.
Cassie is a horrible person with no redeeming qualities. Here’s how you know. She saves somebody in a little kid’s family, the kid draws her a picture that says you saved my family, and because she doesn’t have a mom or a dad she gets sad and throws it away.
Her power is seeing the future, and the movie never really tells you that. It plays a scene, then cuts right back to before it happened. At a giant fire at the docks it keeps flipping between her giving CPR to one guy and a vision of her giving CPR to her chief, over and over, and it’s really confusing. Then the chief pulls out in the ambulance and a semi truck hits him. There’s maybe 20 meters between that crash and the water, and the rig is going full speed, so physically it would have just driven into the water. This movie clearly never passed elementary school.
We almost skipped how she gets the visions. On an earlier call she falls into the water and dies for three minutes before Ben Parker revives her. While she’s under she has an out-of-body experience with cloudy webs forming around her and a giant orb, and it was kind of cool looking.
A Kidnapping the Movie Keeps Justifying
In a subway station she starts seeing the villain kill each of the three girls, one at a time. He wants them dead because he has visions that they grow up and kill him. The stupidest part is that his people put the pictures from his visions into a computer and use AI to get a perfect present-day image of each girl, in the same clothes. There’s only so much movie magic you can do before it’s too convenient. It was corny.
So she basically kidnaps them off a train, and the whole movie keeps justifying a 27-year-old woman kidnapping teenage girls. Julia yells that this woman’s trying to abduct them. When the cops finally grab Cassie, the villain shows up and kills the cops. If you want to kill the girls, why are you killing the people who are seizing the lady stopping you?
She steals a taxi, drives them out to the woods, talks to them for a very little amount of time, and says she’ll be back in a few hours. She leaves them expired beef jerky. The girls introduce themselves (Julia took a year of Taekwondo, the skater girl’s parents left her some money before they went to China) and then they walk to a diner a mile down the road.
Cassie has a vision of him killing all of them in that diner, and it snaps back to her at the camp in another poor edit. She races over and puts the taxi through the front of the building. She crashed into so many things in this movie.
At the motel you find out none of the girls really have parents, and Cassie came up in foster care, so they all conveniently have that in common. Then she leaves these teenagers alone again, after they walked off the first time. She has an almost telepathic conversation with the villain, wakes up at 5:07 in the morning, and it looks like noon outside. And there’s a CPR lesson, which you know is conveniently going to be needed at the end.
You Have to Find Your Web
Ben Parker takes the girls to Peter Parker’s mom, who’s pregnant with Peter, but you’re not allowed to say his name. Cassie flies to Peru and instantly finds the man who helped deliver her. He tells her she has to find her web, takes her to the cave where she was born, and pushes her into the water. Again.
The vision shows her why her mom was down there. The baby had a neurological disease that would have made her muscles and bones pretty much useless, and the spider’s venom was the only way to save her. There were so many more spiders.
Then the two of them hug, and she says, “You’re not the mom I thought you were.” That’s where we lost it. It was supposed to be sweet, and it was so poorly executed. We disagreed a little on the acting. Boyfriend Know-It-All said it was dry. I think it was dry because the script was so bad they kind of had to play it that way. She hugged her mom with the straight face emoji.
The Calvin Klein Ad
Mary goes into labor a month early, so everybody piles into Ben’s car for the hospital. Cassie gets back, looks into Mary’s apartment, sees a puddle on the floor, and decides her water broke. It could have just been water.
She ditches the taxi to steal an ambulance. For some reason she thought it was smart to take the license plate off the taxi, even though the number is right there on the roof.
The villain’s hacker turns every light green, which causes a giant traffic jam with the girls stuck in the middle. Cassie’s running late, but conveniently there’s a Calvin Klein ad, and guess what busts through it. Another crash, for convenience.
The big fight mixes the visions with the real action so much that the movie gives up, and it’s just Dakota Johnson going “duck” and “look out.” At the end all three girls are in danger at once, and apparently these spider people can be in multiple places, so she splits and saves every one of them. One of them tells her she’s showing off, she says “yeah, a little bit,” and it hurt.
She kills him on a giant sign, falls into the water, and takes a firework to the face, which blinds her. Julia jumps in after her, and conveniently they all do CPR.
In the hospital Mary’s baby is born. A nurse says family only and Cassie says, “This is my family.” I could have written this better with a good prompt. Then she’s in a wheelchair, blind, looking out a window. Why is she looking out the window? She says bless you before a girl sneezes, tells them she can see they have a really bright and strong future, the girls say “we know,” and the movie ends.
They want you to think she redeemed herself and has a family now. Nothing built up to her earning that.
The Movie in the Trailers
The reason this review has been so scattered is that’s how the movie was. There was so little for so much.
We’re really disappointed, because they had such a good cast, and there’s only so much good actors can do with what they’re given. It had a good baseline if the writing hadn’t been done by a fifth grader. The best of them was Sydney Sweeney. She played a good awkward white girl.
The trailers showed a movie we just didn’t see. The girls are in their suits for under a minute, and those suits are on the poster. I’ve never read the comics, so I wanted to know how the girls got their powers. They don’t. Dakota Johnson gets hit in the face with a firework and now she’s blind.
It throws too much at you at once and doesn’t explain any of it until the end. That can work, but only if it’s executed correctly, and they didn’t execute it.
So there you go, now you know, and if knowing’s half the battle you’re halfway to being a know-it-all yourself.
The Verdict
Madame Web gets two numbers on the Know-It-All Index, a 1.8 out of 10 and a 3 out of 10, and we’re not merging them. The 3 is only for the casting. It was still an absolutely horrible movie.
It’s one of the worst rated movies out there, and critics and audiences both hated it. I’ve seen bad B movies. This was a bad high-budget movie. Don’t waste an hour and 50 minutes of your life on it, and if you saw it in theaters, I’m sorry you spent the money.
Which number is closer for you, the 1.8 or the 3? Tell us in the comments on the video above. Never forget, everyone loves a know-it-all.
