Madame Web Is the Third or Fourth-Best Superhero Movie of 2003

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.