- Starring
- Dakota Johnson, Tamar Rahim
- Director
- S.J. Clarkson
- Rating
- PG-13
- Genre
- Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Thriller
- Release date
- Feb. 14, 2024
Overall Score
Rating Overview
Rating Summary
Madame Web was created by writer Denny O’Neil and artist John Romita Jr., making her first appearance in “The Amazing Spider-Man” #210 in 1980. Initially portrayed as a clairvoyant and paraplegic, Madame Web, also known as Cassandra Webb, serves as a mentor and guide to Spider-Man, offering guidance and foresight. Over the years, her character has undergone various interpretations and developments, often playing a pivotal role in Spider-Man’s adventures and the wider Marvel Comics universe.
UPDATE: In my rush to get this review out, as well as the others that I’m working on, I inadvertently scored some of the ratings incorrectly. They have been updated to better reflect the horror show of incompetence that is Madame Web.
Madame Web
Cassandra Webb, played by Dakota Johnson, is your everyday New York City paramedic with movie-star good looks, poor social skills, and a mysterious past. That is until a near-death experience begins to unlock her inner awesomeness, and she finds herself caught in the web of a mysterious and homicidal villain.
Cassandra will have to take a day trip and have a conversation to learn to accept how incredible she truly is if she hopes to save the three teenage girls destined to become the cosplayers… er, that is … superheroes who are the target of the villain’s murderous rage.
Madame Web is a gnarled web of narrative nonsense. While Tahar Rahim might inexpertly play the movie’s poorly developed villain, the film’s true villains are its writers, Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, and Claire Parker. With two-thirds of them to thank for the unmitigated disaster that was Morbius and the third having this empty husk as her sole screenwriting credit, it’s a miracle that Madame Web isn’t worse than mind-numbingly boring.
Whether it’s a conveniently misplaced wonder bar inexplicably tucked beneath a nearby parked car just in time to help the protagonist remove a license plate, or embarking on an elaborate rainforest expedition across distant lands only to immediately stumble upon the precise location where a knowledgeable figure awaits, no contrivance appears too big nor convenience too small to help this trio of writing stooges out of the narrative corners into which they paint themselves in virtually every scene.
Unfortunately, their ineptitude doesn’t end there. Most of their characters have all of the dimensions of a cosmic string, and those with more are given woefully little screen time, but that doesn’t really matter because no character receives any meaningful growth arcs.
Cassandra spends most of her time on a series of mundane fetch quests for groceries and clothes, somehow never being spotted by anyone in a city of millions while her face paints every TV and mobile screen in the state as she travels from one location to the next (including on an international flight – ostensibly after going through at least one security checkpoint in the airport) without taking even the simplest precautions to hide her identity, all while being wanted as a person of interest in a triple kidnapping and possible murder. When she does experience some character growth, the means of that growth are handed to her without conflict or exacting any price. Her true potential as an unstoppable girl boss is simply handed to her.
Meanwhile, the trio of teenage girls whom Cassandra has taken it upon herself to protect (except when she repeatedly abandons them) spend time eating and dancing on tables (No. seriously, that’s the moment in which they gel into a group of friends – when they dance on a table like sluts for a group of strange teenage boys).
Some of this fumbling and impotent script could have been forgiven if a single performer outside of Adam Scott’s three seconds as Ben Parker were to have exuded a mouse turd’s worth charisma or charm. Granted that the material that they were working with did them no favors, but Dakota Johnson’s performance was utterly bizarre.
With the exception of a scene in which a friend suddenly dies, Johnson’s Cassandra seems to have only two gears: uninterested and slightly less uninterested. There are scenes in which she witnesses multiple murders and can see the unstoppable monster who perpetrated them coming straight for her. Yet her panic is roughly the equivalent of having misplaced her keys when she’s already late for work.
If movies in which people behave contrary to all human experience, making decisions that no one would ever make is your thing, and you like cartoonishly and poorly acted villains barfing out 6th rate dialogue while characters you don’t care about do things you won’t remember, Madame Webb still isn’t worth watching.
WOKE ELEMENTS
UPDATE: So much of this film is forgettable. So, when writing the review, I completely forgot the origin of one of the teenage girls. Her latino father just so happens to have been in the U.S. illegally. After he was heartlessly deported, she was left to fend for herself. This silly shoehorned-in bit o’ identity politics earns another 5pts off of the Woke-O-Meter, taking the film into “Woke-ish” territory.
As horrifically horrible as this movie is, it’s not terribly woke. It surely wants to be woke, but the filmmakers were so incompetent that they weren’t able to get that across successfully.
Modern Women
- There’s a very lame attempt to paint Celeste O’Connor’s Mattie Franklin as a skateboarding rebel that some might consider to be woke because she acts like a traditional rebel boy, but it’s there and gone in a blink and is so poorly done that it’s more laughable than lamentable.
- Cassandra is miserably uncomfortable and awkward around a group of TradWives at a baby shower. They are written as vapid bubble heads while Cassandra looks on with barely concealed disgust at their feminity.
- There’s some lip service paid to trash-talking tough women with $h!tty attitudes instead of personalities, but it lasts for less time than a taco fart, and the character isn’t portrayed as awesome for being a jerk. Instead, she eventually lets down her defenses and is rather respectful from then on out.
- Maybe it’s a nod to the comics, maybe not, but one of the girls is really good at math. That, of course, is not woke. What is, is her stupid t-shirt that says something or other about girls doing math and the screenwriters’ juvenile attempts to round peg it into several scenes just to make sure that you know that hot girls can be smart too. We get it; girls can excel at STEM.
The World Has Been Ending In 10 Years For Decades
- There’s a hacky line about plastics polluting the ocean ham-fisted into a scene.
It’s ok; the actresses aren’t actually teens.
- There’s an aforementioned scene that goes on longer than a business save a strip club would ever allow, in which the three teenage girls get up on a table and sluttily dance for a group of stranger men. While two of the girls are already wearing midriffs, they tie the third modest one’s shirt up so that she, too, can be a little sluttier.
- This instance is used as a bonding moment, and while the actresses are not teens, their characters are. This show is specifically for young girls ages 13 and up. HOLLYWOOD, STOP SEXUALIZING CHILDREN!!
- This said, the scene is short, and the camera never lingers on the girls. Most of the dancing happens off-camera.
James Carrick
James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.
21 comments
Bunny With A Keyboard
February 16, 2024 at 9:56 pm
I often say that wokeness has all of the negatives of porn but none of the positives that the people who watch porn hope to see. Sounds like the table dance makes for a good example, where the folks who would want to watch a table dance are disappointed and the people who want to watch anything of substance are disappointed as well.
So, why do this review and Argylle say based?
James Carrick
February 16, 2024 at 10:28 pm
https://worthitorwoke.com/screen-shot-2024-02-16-at-9-59-39-pm/
While the concept is certainly woke (which is why we called it out in the Woke Elements) and in story it goes on for all the time, on camera it lasts for a few brief moments. Since, the inappropriate moment wasn’t an ideological through-line for the film’s narrative but just one very stupid moment, it’s my belief that it is insufficient justification to mark the entire movie as woke.
Argylle isn’t particularly woke. It’s not much of anything. Howard’s character was a girl boss at one time, but with the exception of the last 10 minutes of her time on screen, she’s a mostly useless human being throughout the movie.
Bunny With A Keyboard
February 16, 2024 at 10:59 pm
Gotcha. I’m used hearing based as describing when something is particularly against the woke mentality and not just that it doesn’t have severe amounts, but, your website, so I’ll just note that that’s how you rate things.
Thank you for the clarification.
James Carrick
February 16, 2024 at 11:12 pm
It’s subjective nature is why I chose to itemize the wokeness as well.
goqul
February 17, 2024 at 12:34 am
Hey James, the link to the TradWives keyword doesn’t seem to work. It just redirects to the homepage.
James Carrick
February 17, 2024 at 12:36 am
I’m running some maintenance right now. It should be working again soon, but I appreciate the headsup.
Bunny With A Keyboard
February 16, 2024 at 10:11 pm
Robin S. Rosenberg wrote that superheroes are either heroes that become super (Captain America) or supers that become heroes (Thor). Spider-Man becomes a super first and learns to be a hero after Uncle Ben died. It’s easy to see the pattern with male heroes and I doubt I need to explain it for Doctor Strange.
Female characters just don’t seem to get that anymore. They don’t deserve the powers when they get them, nor do they do anything to become worthy of them.
I would consider this essential dichotomy the height of wokeness. Women can and should be written in the exact same way, forged into excellence through tribulation and character development just like the men.
Instead, women get written as if they’re perfect princesses and it’s the world that’s expected to change, even though anyone can see that they’re awful people.
It didn’t used to be this way, especially in Marvel.
James Carrick
February 16, 2024 at 11:11 pm
I agree. However, in this case, Cassandra’s poorly developed hero’s journey seemed more due to the incompetence of its writers than any particular ideological bent.
Bunny With A Keyboard
February 17, 2024 at 11:12 am
Huh.
As it stands, Elektra is the best female-led Marvel movie ever made, but if they actually really did try to do a hero’s journey on this one, it might be a contender for that title.
Same way that Morbius is the best 2022 Marvel movie. There just aren’t that many real contenders for the title.
goqul
February 17, 2024 at 12:30 am
But but but gIrL pOwEr???!!!
Sweet Deals
February 17, 2024 at 8:09 pm
The heroes in a story are only as good as the people who tell the stories. When the people who tell the stories have stupid definitions on what it means to be a hero, the heroes become annoying, and then they expect us to believe that being annoying is what makes them heroic.
I could go on and on, but today I’d rather be brief and succinct.
Bunny With A Keyboard
February 18, 2024 at 9:54 am
Or worse, like when Sam Wilson sided with a terrorist over a senator whose only crime (for which he needed to “do better”) was wanting to give people back the stuff that was taken while they were Snapped.
They needed to have another villain shoot Flag Smasher because Sam Wilson wasn’t willing to fight back.
Somehow this is the guy that they expect us to be hyped over with the in name only “Captain America” movie.
Julia
February 28, 2024 at 8:25 am
I’d be interested in the cross of wokeness and MarySue-ness. Surely I see that now in film…when did that first happen, and is that now the female superhero norm?
Bunny With A Keyboard
February 28, 2024 at 11:25 am
Mary Sue-ness predates this millennium.
Do a comparison on Pamela Anderson’s movie Barb Wire and Space Jam’s Lola Bunny.
As bad as Barb Wire was, being called “babe” was actually a character flaw, where the villains knew that calling her “babe” would outrage her and could get her to make mistakes as a result.
By contrast, calling Lola Bunny “doll” just means that she’ll handily get the better of whoever said it to her and is little more than a distraction. You could get away with it as comedy if it was funny, but it’s not.
Hollywood doesn’t want to write women as nuanced human beings with flaws and limitations, because they see that as being contrary to the “girl power” mentality of just doing everything effortlessly and never being challenged.
True strength and courage are overcoming true challenges, which is why I claim that Hollywood does see women as inferior.
However, it didn’t used to be so ubiquitous. Even well-written stories involving female characters are often remade in the modern day with this kind of treatment.
Sweet Deals
February 28, 2024 at 6:10 pm
I have two suggestions for this thought.
In earlier films, “damsel in distress” was common. A female character would make stupid mistakes she rightfully shouldn’t be making (such as tripping for no reason) so the male hero would look good rescuing her. That, or a female character would get brutally maimed or killed just to tick off the male hero. Viewers considered that attitude sexist and unfair; if you mistreat the characters that half of your audience identifies with, don’t be surprised when they don’t want to read your comic books anymore.
The “girlboss” phenomenon is a bit of an overcorrection. Now, it’s sexist to even suggest that a female character is capable of making honest mistakes, or excuses are made for her when she acts like a jerk. This is about as accurate as looking at a heavily made-up, airbrushed and photoshopped model on the cover of a fashion magazine and trying to sell it to teenagers as being the baseline normal for beauty. People eventually begin to feel inadequate because they can’t reach an impossible and unattainable standard, even though they’re repeatedly told that this is what ordinary people look like. Ironically, this makes female characters far less admirable. The viewers don’t admire her because they know she’s being artificially propped-up, and her greatest victories are often unearned.
The “Mary Sue” phenomenon is even older and more primal than that. I read once about how before H.G. Wells was a famous author, he wrote what he called a “pose novel”. It was basically a story where the main character was an avatar of himself, except better in every way. His teenage self loved it, but his adult self hated it, and he threw the whole manuscript into the fireplace where it belonged. He went on to say he wasn’t the first to write a “pose novel”; if authors weren’t writing pose novels, then Jane Eyre wouldn’t have been written, either. Teenagers are naturally narcissistic as they form their identities. They want to think of themselves as the center of their universe and more special than everyone else. Adults eventually outgrow this kind of thinking, but it seems we’re living in an age of prolonged adolescence. Today’s storytellers and filmmakers don’t seem to learn the lesson that they don’t have to be the center of the universe to make a positive impact on it. It’s why we get lazy stories where the heroes win not because of their strength or virtue, but because the universe configures itself to ensure that the heroes win.
It’s not radical progressivism; it’s just immaturity and small-mindedness.
Bunny With A Keyboard
February 28, 2024 at 6:49 pm
The difference, I’d say, is how the political aspect keeps the “girlboss” phenomenon and the “pose novels” from being recognized as bad stories. For several years at least, any pointing out of these issues is dismissed as misogyny, even when it’s actual misogyny to defend them. For example, propping up Ghostbusters 2016 with the claim that it’s a good movie for women implies that women are terrible at comedy and that such is the best they can do.
Really, girlbosses are probably a lot older than that. Lola Bunny in Space Jam doesn’t serve any purpose to, for example, help the team train as a mentor or anything like that. She just does a joke when called doll that was old and tired even when she did it, and was sadly done better by Pamela Anderson when Barb Wire was called Babe. At least then, the villains were able to use it against her when she loses her temper, making it a genuine character flaw.
She-Hulk likewise showed us that they have no interest or intention of doing a genuinely good job and would rather outright mock the fanbase.
An overcorrection should itself course correct over time, but this has only gotten worse over the decades.
Bilal Islam
March 3, 2024 at 9:43 am
Dakota Johnson is your standard for movie-star good looks? Seriously?
Bilal Islam
March 3, 2024 at 9:46 am
“when they dance on a table like sluts for a group of strange teenage boys”
How is that a bad thing?
Bilal Islam
March 3, 2024 at 9:49 am
There’s nothing wrong with Lola Bunny in the original Space Jam.
Bunny With A Keyboard
March 3, 2024 at 11:51 am
My issues are not with how she was drawn in the original, but with how she’s written. Pamela Anderson’s Barb Wire was better written, and that’s a low bar.
Bilal Islam
March 3, 2024 at 9:53 am
“This instance is used as a bonding moment, and while the actresses are not teens, their characters are. This show is specifically for young girls ages 13 and up. HOLLYWOOD, STOP SEXUALIZING CHILDREN!!”
Is this website run by retard feminists or something? The only good thing about this movie are Sydney Sweeney and her boobs