Spider bites
The question of Dakota Johnson is one I am not prepared to answer. Is she, in any conventional sense, a "good" actor? I honestly don't know if there's enough evidence to judge. She is, I think, a very disrespectful actor: when she is handed a bum script, as she has been handed one with Madame Web, she doesn't pretend otherwise, doing the thing that e.g. classically-trained British actors do where they still take the craft seriously and try to make the most out of whatever character they can imagine out of the script. No, as we saw in 2015's Fifty Shades of Grey, her big coming-out party as a movie star, and its two sequels, if she knows a script sucks, she flaunts it. She smirks and giggles and eye-rolls her way through that motherfucker, just laying it all bare in front of the camera that she cannot possibly be bothered to take this seriously.
Is this admirable? Is it respectable? Is it appropriate for an actor getting paid to do a job to do it this way, holding the project in such open contempt? I dunno, but I'll say this on Johnson's behalf: Madame Web already sucks badly enough, and her shit-eating grin of a performance is one of the very, very few parts of it that has anything resembling a human pulse. So I would, at least, not prefer to see the version of the movie where she isn't doing that.
The script is pretty rotten here, as far as I can tell. And that's not very far. The writing credits are like carefully sifting through archaeological layers: the most recent draft of the script is by Claire Parker & S.J. Clarkson (the latter also directs, her feature debut), and that's a revision to the draft by Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless, who also got the story into its final shape, revising a story by Kerem Sanga. And that's just the people who received onscreen credit, which in this case is especially obviously not the whole list. Three of those five names don't have robust enough screenwriting CVs to have any expectations for them, while Sazama & Sharpless put in a good bid to have the worst filmography of any screenwriters working at their level: Dracula Untold (2014), The Last Witch Hunter (2015), Gods of Egypt (2016), story contributions to Power Rangers (2017), and the rotten cherry on top, Morbius (2022), which ostensibly lives in the same cinematic superhero universe as Madame Web. And say what one will about Madame Web, I don't think it's even close to the level of depraved ineptitude as was displayed in Morbius.
Anyway, just based on Sazama & Sharpless's mortuary full of cinematic corpses, it's easy to want to assume that Madame Web was rotten from the bones up, and perhaps it was, but it's not fair to say that. Because the thing that's definitely true of Madame Web is that it was absolutely butchered, just hacked apart by a screaming maniac with a cleaver, in post-production. Which was also true of Morbius, so that's a gloomy thing to try building a cinematic universe out of. Anyways, Madame Web has nothing structurally as downright incomprehensible as that film's attempt to tell a story without a beginning and an ending. In fact, I don't think the problem is that Madame Web is "incomprehensible". It is certainly fair to say that it is arbitrary, with one particular moment in the middle where Johnson's character, Cassandra Webb, leaves a taxicab full of scared teenagers in the deep woods of upstate New York, with no motivation that makes more sense than "if I don't, the plot might resolve a bit sooner". But the sin here is really that far too much visible labor goes into explaining things, which characters reciting exposition at a dully even pace and routinely clarifying what's going in slightly-too-loud, slightly-too-clear dialogue that is spoken when their mouths are not visible, or sometimes, when the film is trying to not seem exactly like a B-production from the 1950s, in an insert shot of Johnson almost visibly sweating as she tries to remember what was going on in this scene that she last filmed nine months ago. Because again: this is so very obviously a film that did not find wide release in anything like the form that it was going to take when they had what they thought was a shooting script at the start of production. We even know some of the details: this was shifted from the '90s to the 2000s at some point very late in the game, which is why there is a completely superfluous shot of Johnson declaring that she's going to go home and watch American Idol in the dull, nervous-rabbit tones of someone delivering their captor's demands in a hostage video. And this was because nobody could quite decide how much this is supposed to tie into the generic concept of the Marvel superhero Spider-Man, versus how much this is supposed to tie into the specific Spider-Man who has been played by Tom Holland in such movies as Avengers: Infinity War and Spider-Man: No Way Home. By which I actually mean, this was because the Sony lawyers needed to work out exactly how much this could be about the Tom Holland Spider-Man before the Disney lawyers unleashed all the forces of Hell on them. Answer: enough so that Cassandra's co-worker could be named "Ben Parker" (Adam Scott), but not so much that Ben Parker's newborn nephew could be named "Peter". Ben also has recently started dating an unseen woman who doesn't have the first name "May" in the most conspicuous possible dialogue to make sure we notice that a character doesn't have the first name May.
The result: a pretty bedraggled mess of post-dubbed lines, pickup shots, and scenes desperately trying to Kuleshov themselves together out of footage that was very obviously not shot at the same time by the same crew. At one point, Cassandra sweeps into the Peruvian jungle for three whole establishing shots, none of which appear to be chronologically continuous with each other.
So this is all, to be clear, quite terrible, and I actually haven't even come close to exhausting it all. Tahar Rahim, as the bad guy Ezekiel Sims, has redubbed literally every single one of his lines, in a very unintentionally silly accent that I think was the primary reason for the redubbing. A final scene of such beatifically wrong-headed tonal contrast to rest of the movie is sutured on, either in the stubborn hope of willing a sequel into existence, or the mortified acknowledgement that no such sequel has a prayer in hell of coming so they need to tie things off quickly, I genuinely cannot tell. The color grading is truly evil, pushing everything slightly towards a slightly more-green-than-teal hue, but pushing the shadows slightly farther to it than the highlights, so everything dark in the movie seems to be glowing slightly blue. The central spine of the narrative is built around three teenage girls who have very important but completely undefined superpowers, none of which actually manifest in the movie, and who have been given such little definition in the script as personalities that even the fact that they're three different races wasn't always quite enough for me to remember which one was which (the white one is played by 2024's new It Girl, Sydney Sweeney, which helps).
Anyway, the question of Dakota Johnson: is she convincing me on any level that Cassandra Webb exists as a person? No. Does she seem to understand what the hell is up with Cassandra's superpower (which is the absolutely only imaginable superpower for a character named "Cassandra Webb": spider-derived abilities to see the future, but in cryptic ways that aren't always immediately helpful or legible)? No. Would Madame Web be a better movie if Johnson was replaced with somebody else? Absolutely not. Her glib attitude is pretty much the solitary authentic human emotion in Madame Web, and it's not one the movie can "do" anything with. It's not secretly re-writing the film as a self-negating satire, the way that Johnson's performance in in the Fifty Shades trilogy maybe sort of did. But at least it gives us onscreen permission to laugh at how nonsensical and half-assed this all is.
And I will say, to the film's very meager credit: S.J. Clarkson is trying. She succeeds at times. Whenever the film is solely about Cassandra being beset by visions from her spider-clairvoyance without understanding what's happening, but possessing just enough situational awareness to recognise when the thing she thought she saw is now the thing she's actually seeing, it generally works in terms of basic thriller mechanics, and Clarkson's use of repeated shot set-ups helps clarify Cassandra's powers more than script, in its current configuration, ever can. The occasional magical spider-visions are kind of cheesy in their scattered psychedelic visuals, but it's the right kind of cheesy for a movie that always seem sort of conscious of how much happier its life would be as a goofy B-picture that could e.g. set lengthy scenes in generic-looking diners and this would seem charmingly threadbare rather than embarrassingly small potatoes. But, sadly, superhero movies don't get to be B-pictures in 2024, and there's nothing charming about this: it's just janky crap, barely held together and is possibly a sign of excessive generosity on my part to even give it that "barely".
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
Is this admirable? Is it respectable? Is it appropriate for an actor getting paid to do a job to do it this way, holding the project in such open contempt? I dunno, but I'll say this on Johnson's behalf: Madame Web already sucks badly enough, and her shit-eating grin of a performance is one of the very, very few parts of it that has anything resembling a human pulse. So I would, at least, not prefer to see the version of the movie where she isn't doing that.
The script is pretty rotten here, as far as I can tell. And that's not very far. The writing credits are like carefully sifting through archaeological layers: the most recent draft of the script is by Claire Parker & S.J. Clarkson (the latter also directs, her feature debut), and that's a revision to the draft by Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless, who also got the story into its final shape, revising a story by Kerem Sanga. And that's just the people who received onscreen credit, which in this case is especially obviously not the whole list. Three of those five names don't have robust enough screenwriting CVs to have any expectations for them, while Sazama & Sharpless put in a good bid to have the worst filmography of any screenwriters working at their level: Dracula Untold (2014), The Last Witch Hunter (2015), Gods of Egypt (2016), story contributions to Power Rangers (2017), and the rotten cherry on top, Morbius (2022), which ostensibly lives in the same cinematic superhero universe as Madame Web. And say what one will about Madame Web, I don't think it's even close to the level of depraved ineptitude as was displayed in Morbius.
Anyway, just based on Sazama & Sharpless's mortuary full of cinematic corpses, it's easy to want to assume that Madame Web was rotten from the bones up, and perhaps it was, but it's not fair to say that. Because the thing that's definitely true of Madame Web is that it was absolutely butchered, just hacked apart by a screaming maniac with a cleaver, in post-production. Which was also true of Morbius, so that's a gloomy thing to try building a cinematic universe out of. Anyways, Madame Web has nothing structurally as downright incomprehensible as that film's attempt to tell a story without a beginning and an ending. In fact, I don't think the problem is that Madame Web is "incomprehensible". It is certainly fair to say that it is arbitrary, with one particular moment in the middle where Johnson's character, Cassandra Webb, leaves a taxicab full of scared teenagers in the deep woods of upstate New York, with no motivation that makes more sense than "if I don't, the plot might resolve a bit sooner". But the sin here is really that far too much visible labor goes into explaining things, which characters reciting exposition at a dully even pace and routinely clarifying what's going in slightly-too-loud, slightly-too-clear dialogue that is spoken when their mouths are not visible, or sometimes, when the film is trying to not seem exactly like a B-production from the 1950s, in an insert shot of Johnson almost visibly sweating as she tries to remember what was going on in this scene that she last filmed nine months ago. Because again: this is so very obviously a film that did not find wide release in anything like the form that it was going to take when they had what they thought was a shooting script at the start of production. We even know some of the details: this was shifted from the '90s to the 2000s at some point very late in the game, which is why there is a completely superfluous shot of Johnson declaring that she's going to go home and watch American Idol in the dull, nervous-rabbit tones of someone delivering their captor's demands in a hostage video. And this was because nobody could quite decide how much this is supposed to tie into the generic concept of the Marvel superhero Spider-Man, versus how much this is supposed to tie into the specific Spider-Man who has been played by Tom Holland in such movies as Avengers: Infinity War and Spider-Man: No Way Home. By which I actually mean, this was because the Sony lawyers needed to work out exactly how much this could be about the Tom Holland Spider-Man before the Disney lawyers unleashed all the forces of Hell on them. Answer: enough so that Cassandra's co-worker could be named "Ben Parker" (Adam Scott), but not so much that Ben Parker's newborn nephew could be named "Peter". Ben also has recently started dating an unseen woman who doesn't have the first name "May" in the most conspicuous possible dialogue to make sure we notice that a character doesn't have the first name May.
The result: a pretty bedraggled mess of post-dubbed lines, pickup shots, and scenes desperately trying to Kuleshov themselves together out of footage that was very obviously not shot at the same time by the same crew. At one point, Cassandra sweeps into the Peruvian jungle for three whole establishing shots, none of which appear to be chronologically continuous with each other.
So this is all, to be clear, quite terrible, and I actually haven't even come close to exhausting it all. Tahar Rahim, as the bad guy Ezekiel Sims, has redubbed literally every single one of his lines, in a very unintentionally silly accent that I think was the primary reason for the redubbing. A final scene of such beatifically wrong-headed tonal contrast to rest of the movie is sutured on, either in the stubborn hope of willing a sequel into existence, or the mortified acknowledgement that no such sequel has a prayer in hell of coming so they need to tie things off quickly, I genuinely cannot tell. The color grading is truly evil, pushing everything slightly towards a slightly more-green-than-teal hue, but pushing the shadows slightly farther to it than the highlights, so everything dark in the movie seems to be glowing slightly blue. The central spine of the narrative is built around three teenage girls who have very important but completely undefined superpowers, none of which actually manifest in the movie, and who have been given such little definition in the script as personalities that even the fact that they're three different races wasn't always quite enough for me to remember which one was which (the white one is played by 2024's new It Girl, Sydney Sweeney, which helps).
Anyway, the question of Dakota Johnson: is she convincing me on any level that Cassandra Webb exists as a person? No. Does she seem to understand what the hell is up with Cassandra's superpower (which is the absolutely only imaginable superpower for a character named "Cassandra Webb": spider-derived abilities to see the future, but in cryptic ways that aren't always immediately helpful or legible)? No. Would Madame Web be a better movie if Johnson was replaced with somebody else? Absolutely not. Her glib attitude is pretty much the solitary authentic human emotion in Madame Web, and it's not one the movie can "do" anything with. It's not secretly re-writing the film as a self-negating satire, the way that Johnson's performance in in the Fifty Shades trilogy maybe sort of did. But at least it gives us onscreen permission to laugh at how nonsensical and half-assed this all is.
And I will say, to the film's very meager credit: S.J. Clarkson is trying. She succeeds at times. Whenever the film is solely about Cassandra being beset by visions from her spider-clairvoyance without understanding what's happening, but possessing just enough situational awareness to recognise when the thing she thought she saw is now the thing she's actually seeing, it generally works in terms of basic thriller mechanics, and Clarkson's use of repeated shot set-ups helps clarify Cassandra's powers more than script, in its current configuration, ever can. The occasional magical spider-visions are kind of cheesy in their scattered psychedelic visuals, but it's the right kind of cheesy for a movie that always seem sort of conscious of how much happier its life would be as a goofy B-picture that could e.g. set lengthy scenes in generic-looking diners and this would seem charmingly threadbare rather than embarrassingly small potatoes. But, sadly, superhero movies don't get to be B-pictures in 2024, and there's nothing charming about this: it's just janky crap, barely held together and is possibly a sign of excessive generosity on my part to even give it that "barely".
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
