With some actors, it is a pleasure just to watch them think – to do virtually nothing but silently convey the process of wheels turning inside their heads. Dakota Johnson is not such an actor. I don’t say this because she seems stupid. On the contrary, in interviews she often comes across as unflappable, sharp perhaps to the point of cutting. It’s exactly this quality that makes visible calculation look out of place on her; if she puzzles things out in public, she conceals it very well. What she does most interestingly on screen is seethe and stew, as she does in The Lost Daughter and Cha Cha Real Smooth, both times playing young mothers whose possessiveness of their children competes with their weariness and regrets.
In Madame Web, Johnson finds herself again caring for children, albeit those who feel more confident in their abilities to care for themselves. Cassie Webb (Johnson), a thirtyish paramedic working in New York City, has a brush with death that leaves her with short-term visions of the future, which in turn draws her closer to three seemingly random figures: Sweet, unassertive Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney); brainy, skeptical Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced); and independent, impulsive Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor). These names may set comic book devotees’ hearts aflutter. Even more casual readers or movie-watchers may recognize how Ben Parker (Adam Scott), Cassie’s friend and coworker, bears a significant moniker in the world of your friendly neighborhood movie star Spider-Man, to which Madame Web is nominally adjacent. This is one of those Sony-produced “SSU” spinoff movies, like Venom or Morbius, where the webslinger himself does not appear – or does he? (No, not really, though the technicalities could make for some fun, nitpicky debates.)
But for the purposes of attempting to watch a normal movie like a normal person who does not need assurances in one direction or another about how connected this all is to a broader cinematic universe, this is a big-budget vehicle for Johnson. It’s the first such thing since her Fifty Shades days – a gig that, to be fair, seemed to engender more contempt from her than this one. Here, she seems to be giving Cassandra Webb the old college try. Her presence is compelling in large part because she’s such a clumsy fit for the demonstrative stuff, like delivering exposition, pretending to assess her next move, or reacting with distress when she sees something horrifically violent. She’s most convincingly distressed in a more quietly irritable register, and her ambivalence about these powers, these young women, and this shadowy, menacing, Spider-Mannish figure called Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim) all ring true. She seems well and truly uncertain about what she’s doing in a sorta-superhero picture.
Johnson works so well in this department, in fact, that she renders the movie’s endless rerunning of her Next routine redundant; the audience gets the concept long before the movie realizes they do. Director S.J. Clarkson, a TV vet making her film debut, contributed to a multi-authored screenplay that’s as scattered in focus as Cassie’s visions. The core idea of Cassie reluctantly leading a future super-team (in a detail that sounds hastily fabricated but is actually just comic books, all three of the younger characters are fated to become different versions of the hero Spider-Woman) makes sense enough. The idea of a nightmarish alt-universe Bad Spider-Man coming after them, which is what Ezekiel essentially represents, is downright tantalizing, and sometimes staged with appropriate menace. The strands that are supposed to connect all of this together in a web of intrigue, however, don’t have much tensile strength. Ezekiel is rich, for reasons unexplained, and able to stalk the future Spider-Women by hiring an assistant played by Zosia Mamet, for reasons unexplained, who is in charge of a massive surveillance system that is, for yet more reasons unexplained, treated as a foolproof system even though it transparently only works within the confines of New York City.
More attention has been paid to convincingly recreating the year 2003, when the movie is set. It would be inaccurate to call this meticulous, or at least this would be incomplete; it’s another New York-set movie where the train cars and the subway platforms and the street scenes all look a bit off. Yet certain period details are bang-on, especially on the soundtrack, which has been scrupulously curated to evoke 2003 (a song from the first Yeah Yeah Yeahs EP; a prominent ad for the first Beyoncé solo album), to the point where a radio-station needle drop of “Toxic” by Britney Spears takes care to note via unseen DJ that this is a new song that seems poised to blow up, presumably intended to remind audience nitpickers that while “Toxic” was a radio sensation in 2004, yes, its album In the Zone, was, in fact, released in the fall of 2003. One character repeatedly jokes that “you wouldn’t like me when I’m hangry,” which may not be a specific reference to the 2003 release of Hulk, but evokes it nonetheless. Cassie also drinks a period-accurate can of Mountain Dew Code Red – or rather, she fiddles with it, just as she later fiddles with a can of Pepsi. Perhaps there were some entertaining negotiations, or even bad blood, between Pepsi, whose products appear throughout, and Johnson, who appears wholly unwilling to consume them on-screen. To make up for this, the film’s climax takes place at a prominent (and real) neon Pepsi-Cola sign in Queens. (The location doubles as a literal fireworks factory, suggesting that the screenwriters are either fans of The Simpsons, or were somehow created by that show.)
If this all sounds beside the point of a movie where a woman develops spider-based powers of clairvoyance and reluctantly uses them to protect a mini-platoon of fellow spider-women, I assure you, it’s no less the point than anything else in Madame Web. But the fussy period pieces may actually be the key to the movie’s peculiarities, which are more easily explainable as a superhero adaptation from, yes, 2003. Not Hulk, mind; nothing so gracefully strange, nor so crackerjack entertaining as X2. But Daredevil… yes, this does feel a bit like Daredevil, with a much better soundtrack. At times, it feels as if Clarkson hopes to turn the clock back 20 years, when comics-to-film continuity was still the province of specialists, and a glorified origin story provided all the sequel tease audiences needed. Maybe she figures that’s the best way to get permission for visual flourishes – twisty angles, inky blacks that practically bleed into the characters’ bodies – that would never make it into the MCU. Cinematographer Mauro Fiore also shot Spider-Man: No Way Home, and guess which movie makes better use of fake New York locations, of comic book color saturation, of the night sky?
At times, the movie’s pleasingly jumpy visual scheme and nostalgic 2003-era cheese threaten to form an alliance and make Madame Web work in spite of itself. After all, the movie, even or especially in its worst moments, never gets dull (or weirdly smug, like its sibling Venom movies). It also never fully sheds a huckster-y addiction to pivoting, until it’s pretty far afield from what works about either a superhero movie or a loopy woo-woo thriller. Unlike Johnson, the movie’s visible calculations never make it look disengaged from the process, or even unconvincing. Just kinda stupid.
Director: S.J. Clarkson
Writer: Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, S.J. Clarkson, Claire Parker
Starring: Dakota Johnson, Adam Scott, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor, Tahar Rahim, Zosia Mamet
Release Date: February 14, 2024
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.