The Entire Plot of 'Madame Web' Recreated With Quotes From Scathing Reviews

Worse than 'Morbius,' you say? Count me in!

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Her web connects them all. (Getty Images for Sony Pictures)

Did you know that there’s a Spider-Man movie opening this week? Well, it’s not a “Spider-Man” movie per se, in that it doesn’t actually have the character called “Spider-Man” in it, but it is part of the “SSU.” That’s the so-named “Sony’s Spider-Man Universe,” which encompasses Sony-distributed Spider-Man movies starring Spider-Man characters like Venom and Morbius (but not actual Spider-Man movies like Spider-Man: No Way Home, because those are part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe). (The animated Spider-Verse movies are “connected” to the SSU, whatever that means).

This non-MCU Spider-man-related “universe” used to be called “The Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters” (SPUMC), presumably until someone at Sony realized that SPUMC kinda looked like “spunk,” which isn’t really something you want to advertise to children.

…Anyway, now it’s called the SSU, the portion of the Spider-Man character universe that, through complex licensing deals with Marvel and Marvel’s parent company, Disney, Sony is still allowed to make movies about (I like the apostrophe in there, “Sony’s Spider-Man Universe” makes it sound like a chain of affordable seafood restaurants). Their latest effort is called Madame Web, which you may remember from its intriguing poster tagline “her web connects them all.”

Or possibly from its even more intriguing viral trailer line, “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.”

That line, delivered by Dakota Johnson, apparently isn’t in the film. But many other fantastic, uncanny valley-sounding lines of dialog are, in film called Madam Web starring Johnson as “Cassie Webb.” A protagonist whose name comes from a pun on the title (see also: Tyler Perry’s Good Deeds, starring Perry as lawyer “Wesley Deeds”) is exactly the kind of film I love to use in my ongoing feature, Plot Recreated With Reviews.

That’s when I read every review I can find of a film and try to recreate the entire plot using only expository review quotes. Because some films are just much better to hear described than to actually see. Madame Web opens this Friday and currently sits at 16% on RottenTomatoes. Critics no doubt felt more free to trash it than if it had been an actual Marvel release, not having to worry whether that bad review will be held against them the next time Marvel is divvying up interview access and whatnot. As Tina Fey said, “authenticity is dangerous and expensive.”

Politics aside, let’s enjoy some Madame Web. Her web connects them all!

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THE SETUP

The movie centers on Cassandra Webb (Johnson), who in the Marvel Comics' Spider-Verse is an all-seeing elderly blind woman confined to a life-support chair, but here gets a superhero origin story that’s sort of Spider-Man lite. (USA Today)

We discover in the movie’s 1970s-set opening that Cassie’s mom (Kerry Bishé) researched spiders in the Amazon while pregnant with Cassie, (Polygon)

…forc(ing) Bishé’s Constance Webb to monotonously recite stats about a rare arachnid “whose peptides can cure hundreds of diseases.” (Rolling Stone)

Why would a spider evolve to make its prey more powerful? (Indiewire)

It only gets worse when Constance’s bodyguard Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), already one mustache twirl away from tying a damsel to railroad tracks, begins musing aloud about “Las Arañas,” the region’s “spider-men” who whiz across treetops. (Rolling Stone)

Ezekiel murders the very pregnant woman he was hired to protect, and flees the scene. (Indiewire)

Constance is rescued by the jungle’s legendary spider-people, who spirit her back to their spider cave, put her in a pool and compel their pet spiders to bite her—none of which protects her from death but does allow her unborn baby to live. [DailyBeast]

TIME JUMP

We fast-forward to NYC circa 2003, when Johnson’s now-grown Cassie is an EMT. (Rolling Stone)

Her only friend is Ben (Adam Scott), who excoriates her for being so grumpy and aloof all the time. (The Spool)

A product of NYC’s foster system who describes herself as a “stray,” Cassie has a natural affinity for saving lives, but she has little interest in being a part of them — as is evidenced by the awkwardness she displays when the young child of a woman she’s saved tries to express their thanks. (Indiewire)

(Important question no one raises: Was she there on 9/11?) (TheSpool)

WEIRD POWERS

After trying to save a man whose car flipped on the highway, Cassie falls into the East River. The near-death experience activates her clairvoyant powers and kicks off the intrigue of the film. (THR)

She can see the future, but only a few seconds into that future. At first, anyway. In the right state of mind, i.e., high crisis mode, Cassie flits from past tense to future tense to present. (Chicago Tribune)

She can see unprompted visions of the future ranging from 30 seconds to five minutes ahead of schedule, which the movie keeps rendering via jittery repeats of a DOA scene you’ve just suffered through once. (Rolling Stone)

By the fourth set piece, it starts to get very tedious. (AP News)

She can also “be in more than one place at the same time.” (Variety)

Already misanthropic, Cassie now feels even more alienated from society. She walks through the world with heightened senses and nagging déjà-vu. (THR)

THE SPIDER GIRLS

Then the trinity of hell-raising skate rat Mattie Fanklin (Celeste O’Connor), mousy goody-two-shoes Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney) — who wears thick sweaters and glasses to fool us into thinking she’s 16 — and STEM propaganda Anya Corazon (she wears a t-shirt that says “I eat MATH for breakfast") come into the picture. (Rolling Stone/JoBlo/Indiewire)

The trio don’t have anything in common until Cassie starts seeing visions of their death. (THR)

A scene in which they try to sell the idea that all four women are connected in some cosmic way is so wildly strained (“you live in my building,” “you ran in front of my truck”) and inconsequential, you wonder if whichever screenwriter wrote their run-ins initially was even talking to the one who had to try to sell these coincidences (AP News)

SECOND ACT

Suddenly plagued by visions of the imminent future, (TheWrap)

Cassie has a futuristic vision in which the three high school girls are all killed by a mysterious man (TheWrap)

whom the girls call “ceiling guy” because he crawls upside-down like a spider. (Variety)

How does he find them? With a hacker played by a delightfully miscast Zosia Mamet. (Indiewire)

After saving the girls from being murdered on the subway, Cassie needs to decode her own traumatic past while keeping her moody new charges safe from this mysterious villain. (USA Today)

THE BAD GUY (WHO WAS ALREADY REVEALED IN THE OPENING FRAME)

Ezekiel seems to have Spider-Man powers, which he gained by murdering Cassie’s mom in the Amazon and stealing her special spider. This is one of exactly two things we learn about him in the entire movie. The second thing we learn is that he has had a dream since the night he got his powers that three women who also have spider powers will one day kill him, so he’s made it his life’s mission to kill them first. (Polygon)

A male Spider-Man saw that he was to be replaced by a new generation of young women and targeted three teenagers to prevent it? Surely he is a stand-in for an aging fanboy, wholly uncomfortable with diversification in the genre. He senses his demise is on the horizon and lashes out at young women on the rise. (Slash Film)

In our glimpse of this dream, we get to see that of course the three women are Anya, Julia, and Mattie, all dressed as Spider-Woman variants from the Marvel comics. (Polygon)

It teases the movie fans actually want to see, which is a full-on Spider-Women team-up film, which is something we seemed to be promised by the trailer. (JoBlo)

But Ezekiel’s dream sequence near the beginning of the movie and a brief vision from Cassie at the end of the movie are all we see of these three fresh heroes. They don’t get their powers in this movie, they don’t find out they’ll one day be heroes, they don’t even fight anyone. (Polygon)

THE SETUPS FOR POSSIBLE FUTURE FRANCHISES

The studio, it seems, is playing a very long game with this one. Cassie’s paramedic colleague is Ben Parker, (AP News)

…whose sister-in-law (Emma Roberts) is pregnant with a child we keenly know to be Peter, and yet his name is never said. (Vanity Fair)

One has to imagine after seeing “Madame Web,” that, ironically, whatever payoff was planned may be a vision that will not come to pass. (AP News)

BAD EFFECTS

Even when shooting on location, the movie feels like a backlot stunt show (Variety)

...a genuine Chernobyl-level disaster that seems to get exponentially more radioactive as it goes along. (Rolling Stone)

Many shots of post-production-dubbed dialogue that clearly don’t match actors’ mouths... (The Spool)

...frequent depictions of Cassie’s dream state, or subconscious, where she’s able to vision-quest all over the place and even commune with her late mother, resemble a waterlogged waiting room just outside an auxiliary quantum realm. (Chicago Tribune)

Rahim is a native French speaker but that’s no excuse for the awfulness of his largely ADR’d line readings, which sound as if they’ve been filtered through an AI voice program. Madame Web then draws further attention to this nouveau-spaghetti Western aesthetic device by hiding Rahim’s mouth in darkness in almost every shot in which he’s not wearing his costume. (Daily Beast).

Plays like a bland, third-season Marvel series as watched on a 12-year-old TV set playing in the wrong dramatic aspect ratio, which I realize isn’t a real thing. (Chicago Tribune)

The characters just stand around and trade perfunctory dialogue in bland locations — sometimes while watching much better movies than the one they’re trapped in — until they inexplicably decide to come out of hiding at a moment that absolutely does not require them to do so. (Indiewire)

BAD ACTING

I generally like Johnson on screen, but her low-stress underplaying is not quite right for this stuff. Nobody in this movie pops, or crackles, or snaps, or finds ways to energize the blah blah. The action’s not much; the acting’s minimalist bordering on somnambulant. (Chicago Tribune)

Not a single line reading feels as if it hasn’t somehow been magically Auto-Tuned to subtract emotion and/or inflection. (Rolling Stone)

Characters spout exposition with all the conviction of someone being held at gunpoint (Inverse)

This is a movie that requires its cast to say with straight faces “Us strays need to stick together” or “Your thread didn’t start when you were born.” (Inverse)

Everyone involved is stuck in the limbo of brand uncertainty; the only concrete confidence anyone is really allowed to have is that they sure do love a crisp Pepsi cola on a hot New York City day. (Or, at least, Boston pretending to be New York City.) (Vanity Fair)

A 2003 PERIOD PIECE, OR IS IT???

the assortment of Clinton-era classics on the soundtrack (e.g. “Dreams,” “Bitch,” “What’s Up?”) definitely feel like orphaned cues from an earlier cut. On the other hand, a building-sized ad for Beyoncé’s 2003 album is flagrantly Photoshopped into the background of a shot that serves no other purpose, and Dakota Johnson has a line of ADR about how she’s “gotta get home in time for ‘Idol,’” (Indiewire)

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. (Paste)

A mention of Martha Stewart’s incarceration… (Vanity Fair)

a classic Calvin Klein ad… (Variety)

…the three Spider-Women-To-Be table dance to Britney Spears’ “Toxic” in a Jersey diner. (Slash Film)

Maybe the whole movie is itself a half-ironic commentary on the aesthetic trappings of 20 years ago. (Vanity Fair)

THE FINALE

The finale is strange for other reasons too, the most obvious of them being that it goes full CGI force-ghost in order to make good on the concept of a movie that otherwise tries to remain as grounded as possible. (Indiewire)

All of these problems compound as the movie progresses until its third, most ridiculous and rushed act, which fast-tracks a heaping helping of character growth for Cassie in a foreign nation just in time to come back and beat the bad guy. Rinse, repeat, put all the chess pieces in their proper place so they can most resemble their comic book counterparts, don’t bother with any postcredits sequences. The end. (The Spool)

“The best thing about the future is — it hasn’t happened yet,” someone intones near the end of Madame Web. (Rolling Stone)

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That sounds pretty bad, but the lack of a post-credits scene almost sold it for me. Then again, there’s nothing worse than sitting through five minutes of credits for a post-credits scene that never materializes. Especially when you’re only waiting for it out of a misguided sense of completeness (which is really the only reason I’ve ever waited for a post-credits scene, beyond professional obligation).

Movies should have to tell you ahead of time whether they have a post-credits scene, like when cops have to tell you that they’re cops. Joe Biden should make that his next executive order.