Film Review: MADAME WEB (2024): S.J. Clarkson’s Superhero Origin Movie is Clever at Times but Also Has Some Banality Sprinkled In

Madame Web Review

Madame Web (2024) Film Review, a movie directed by S.J. Clarkson, written by Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless and Claire Parker and starring Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor, Tahar Rahim, Mike Epps, Emma Roberts, Adam Scott, Kerry Bishe, Zosia Mamet, Jose Maria Yazpik, Josh Drennen, Deirdre McCourt, Naheem Garcia and Jill Hennessy.

Madame Web is a fun movie. There I said it. People are going to laugh this movie off as a disappointment and I understand that notion because it’s not the best of superhero origin pictures. Perhaps, standards are set too high when a big budget movie pulls out all the stops and makes $1 billion at the global box-office. Madame Web is campy and bloated but, at the same time, you won’t be bored even if you wonder how the performers managed to take it all seriously in some of the more intense action scenes in the picture given the goofy scenes that unfold before them. Director S.J. Clarkson doesn’t play games, though, and fearlessly sets the mixed tones that the film employs. Clarkson runs with those tones rather effectively despite the movie’s occasional banality.

Dakota Johnson is the movie’s star. Johnson plays Cassandra Webb, a woman who was born under very unusual circumstances where her mom was seeking out a specific type of spider. A wicked goon named Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim) seeks this spider and will kill anyone who gets in his way of obtaining it. There is a secret as to how Cassandra was born but, in the meantime, her mom meets a dire fate. That surprise, which is revealed in the movie’s latter half, offers answers to viewers that seem more goofy than plausible but still, the movie kinda works.

We skip ahead to the action in the early 2000’s which is set in New York City as Cassandra, a paramedic, rides around the streets with a funny co-worker, Ben (Adam Scott). They rescue a woman related to Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney). Cassandra starts to have visions that her safety and the safety of those around her are in jeopardy. While on a train, she foresees bad things and pulls three girls to the side: Julia, Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced) and Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor). Soon, a masked man is seen crawling in the train station and the police intervene but officers keep getting defeated. The girls wind up fleeing the scene but not before it is determined by the authorities that Cassandra has actually kidnapped the three young women in a taxi-cab.

Cassandra tells the girls of her supposed power to see the future. She asks them to wait patiently in the middle of a forest as Cassandra goes to locate more precise safety precautions (or something like that). The plot unfolds in a clever way with one revelation after the next as it pieces together the past and the present in an effective way although those looking for sensible action scenes may want to look elsewhere. This movie is more concerned with being entertaining than being suspenseful and suffers a bit as a result.

It’s not giving too much away to let you know there will be scenes of the three girls in masks which promise a future with them as superheroes. However, because of the movie’s light (at times) tone, the film doesn’t get the superhero blockbuster vibe on the nose and audiences will certainly complain. Too much exposition ruins the twisty plot and too many one-liners get in the way of the action. It might have been better for the director to take the material in a more serious direction. Even the Venom films did that after some initial laughs in the opening scenes. In Madame Web, we go from a light scene to a heavy one and audiences could get whiplash from the constant shifts in tone.

This is not Dakota Johnson’s best performance and she knows it. This role is simply to put a comic book movie on her resume and although it looked like it could be a big hit on paper, the character development is a little undernourished and some of the dialogue is rather stilted. Cassandra leaves her junk mail in the hallway of her apartment building and one of the key characters complains about that. This is clearly material that is being used to pad the film’s running time and seems like it was made up on the spot despite a script by at least three credited writers and Clarkson in addition.

Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor almost cancel each other out although they look great in costumes. O’Connor was recently in one my favorite movies, A Good Person, and I’d watch her in anything but she is much too talented to be wasting time in roles like this. However, I get the fact that this could have been a huge hit and understand it’s hard to make a living acting when people refuse to see great films like A Good Person in theaters. Sweeney, with her nerdy glasses when she’s out of costume, looks the part she plays but her acting isn’t as good as it was in the recent hit, Anyone but You. Merced is kind of just there and she’s merely adequate in the performance of her role.

The film closes with the song “Dreams” by The Cranberries. That was a good song selection for the material at hand as it throws back the time to a period closer to when the film is set and toys with the visions Cassandra has which are at the core of the film’s plot. Madame Web covers a lot of typical superhero origin movie ground in a unique way that won’t make it a huge crowd-pleaser but the picture will appeal to a select group of people who like their movies strange and peculiar but with some mainstream tendencies mixed in for good measure. I hope that makes sense.

Rating: 6/10

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