These days the movies that top Netflix’s Top 10 list are mostly features they’ve gotten through licensing deals. And that’s true of the current #1 pick, a superhero movie from Sony. And easily the worst superhero movie probably in three decades, Madame Web. But it’s a film that falls squarely into the “it’s so bad it’s good,” category, and it remains my second-favorite theater-going experience of the year, after Dune Part 2.
How can I even describe just how baffling Madame Web is? Sony is attempting to continue to make Spider-Man-adjacent features but without its own Spider-Man, with the character on loan to the MCU. There have been talks about MCU integration with Holland showing up or even bringing back someone like Andrew Garfield as the universe’s Spider-Man, but none of that has manifested. So instead we’re getting projects like Madame Web, where Sony clearly has no idea what to do in this world at this point.
Madame Web, played by Dakota Johnson who very much seems in on the joke here, is granted Spider-powers by her mother who was bitten by a magic spider in the Amazon that has previously given powers to a native race of Spider-people there. Yes, seriously.
But her powers are not terribly useful. She is not strong or fast and cannot shoot webs, she instead has a modified version of Spider-sense where she can rewind time for a minute or two to try to change the outcome of something.
The film tasks her with protecting three future Spider-Women from a Spider-powered villain, Ezekiel Sims, who believes they will kill him in the future because he had a dream about it. He is the only one in the whole film with actual Spider-powers, but he’s just strong and sticky and does not actually shoot webs.
Because Madame Web has no real physical powers, and neither do the girls who are constantly just running away, she has to resort to things like hitting Sims with cars (this happens multiple times) or rewinding time so random things like debris can hit him.
There is also a totally superfluous side story here where Madame Web’s EMT coworker is a young Uncle Ben (this takes place in the 90s) whose wife is giving birth to Peter Parker. So yes, the only time we have seen Spider-Man in this entire Sony universe is as a newborn.
It’s just an amazingly bad film, but one that attracted surprise talent like it-girl Sydney Sweeney as one of the powerless Spider-girls, all three of which are seen in their actual suits for no more than 45 seconds, and only in dream/future sequences. So don’t expect some grand power-getting moment or fight scene from them. It never happens, and this movie is never getting a sequel where this will happen.
Madame Web is just an incredible, astonishingly bad, but extremely fun to watch movie. I would recommend viewing with friends so you’re not laughing alone by yourself. I have no regrets watching this in the way you would regret say, Morbius or Ant Man: Quantumania or Shazam 2, as it’s just that hilariously bad.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
