'Madame Web' is the worst movie of 2024 so far

Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson), a FDNY paramedic, barely survives an accident. In the aftermath, she discovers that she has clairvoyant powers which enable her to see into the future. When a mysterious man (Tahar Rahim) from her past re-emerges and threatens the lives of three young women (Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O'Connor, Isabela Merced), Cassie must face her fears to stop him...

There is a level of disinterest in every facet of 'Madame Web' that is truly fascinating and deserves further examination in the near future. This is a movie that nobody cared about. Everyone is working with a kind of detached indifference, merely clocking in and out of the set like it's a factory job, and giving it the same kind of care and attention. There is no artistry at work here, no diligence or attention, and absolutely no way that anyone, anywhere is ever going to give a shit about this movie. Apart from the laughable dialogue and the smell-the-fart performances, you're going to memory-hole this movie so fast, you'll wonder if it was ever even real.

For a start, nobody was really clamouring for this movie. Sure, comic-book movies are in their flop era and Sony's repeated attempts at making any kind of comic-book movie outside of 'Spider-Man' or 'Venom' have been flagrantly terrible, but 'Madame Web' exists solely in the minds of studio executives looking for cheap, sellable content. In fact, there's a nice chunk of corporate synergy going on here. PepsiCo must have underwritten a sizeable chunk of the production budget, as there are examples of product placement in this ball of shit that would make Michael Bay weep with joy. The final setpiece actually takes place on top of a neon Pepsi-Cola sign. Really.

Dakota Johnson, for all of her nepo-baby credentials, is a reasonably talented actor. You only need to see the kind of layered and nuanced performance she gave in 'The Lost Daughter' opposite Oscar-winner Olivia Colman to know that she's capable of portraying depth and subtle emotions. This, however, is not it. You can actually see her disassociate from herself when she has to say some of the lines and pretend to be shocked at something that'll be added in later with cheap CGI. Tahar Rahim gives a completely inept performance with some of the worst ADR ever captured on screen, while Adam Scott and Emma Roberts are complete non-entities in this. The trio of Spider-Women, with Sydney Sweeney pushed out to the front, are equally empty placeholders that are only revealed in the dying moments.

Do all of the problems with this rest on director SJ Clarkson and the four credited writers? Perhaps. SJ Clarkson was a TV director who started off on 'Eastenders' and graduated to the likes of BBC's 'Life On Mars', 'Orange Is The New Black', 'Jessica Jones' and 'Anatomy of a Scandal'. All fine television, but none of them speak to a particularly unique voice or a clear talent at play. Out of the two of the four writers, Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless were responsible for clunkers like 'Gods of Egypt', 'Morbius', and 'Dracula Untold'. Why would a studio expect them to turn in something good when this was on their resume? No, the real problem with 'Madame Web' is that it was ever made in the first place.

Nobody wanted this movie. Nobody. Instead, it was forced onto everyone involved and it will stain their careers and their IMDb pages for years to come. It'll be the butt of a few memes and shitty 'SNL' sketches in the coming weeks. There'll be a tidy churn of discourse around it, and you might even see a couple of thinkpieces about the possibility of comic-book movies coming to an end and 'Madame Web' representing a glass cliff. It isn't so much that this thing is symptomatic of a larger problem, or that it's made by people who just didn't care. It's that a cabal of studio executive dipshits in Sony Pictures thought anyone was going to swallow this in the first place. That's not indifference. That shows a kind of contempt for its audience that deserves to be acknowledged.

A mob of suits wanted this and then flushed it into existence. We all now have to live in the aftermath.