Will Sorg-

You have not experienced true enlightenment until you have watched Madame Web. My sides hurt so bad from laughing after watching this movie. I don’t know how to describe this cinematic experience. I think I saw God and her name is Dakota Johnson.

Madame Web is a Sony-produced superhero movie set in the Spider-Man universe that has yet to feature Spider-Man in any of its movies. Okay, I’m actually not sure if it takes place in the Sony Spider-Verse because this movie does not make any sense. This movie seems unsure of what year it is. It is technically set in 2003, but they supposedly filmed the movie intending to make it a prequel to the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies. As a result, the whole thing looks considerably more like the 90s. And it gets weirder.

Believe it or not, this is a movie that features no real superheroes. Yes, it is somehow an origin story for 5 separate characters including an unborn child… yet it does not have a sequence longer than 2 minutes featuring women in spider costumes beating up bad guys. The movie is a strange hybrid of all the worst tendencies of superhero movies, but it isn’t really a superhero movie. It’s a thriller.

This movie is a mess. It is a Frankenstein monster of a film, pasted together through reshoots and half-attempted salvages. It eludes logic and seems to be made by a team of dogs or perhaps even very smart birds. Of course, movie-making is incredibly difficult and the many people working on this are very talented. This includes director S.J. Clarkson – who was clearly handed a project that was at its core rotten. Here’s the thing. I don’t think anyone could make this story work. You could give this movie to a team of bonafide action movie experts (probably a better idea than handing it to a director who has mainly worked on very good TV dramas) but they would still manage to render this an incomprehensible mess.

This movie has no rhyme or reason. It is truly hard to explain through writing, so do your best to imagine a movie where a bunch of people do things and say things, but everything they say is unintentionally hilarious and everything they do is nearly impossible to follow. It is a movie somehow so blatantly formulaic that it becomes confusing. Take, for example, the titular Madame Web. She is a 30-something woman who learns to be selfless and brave in the face of adversity and becomes a mentor to three high school students who are being attacked by the main villain. However, Dakota Johnson delivers every single one of her bafflingly stupid lines like she is either confused or her character has become aware of the film she is in and is making fun of the movie with us.

Here’s the gist of the plot: Cassandra Webb can see the future (sometimes) and she needs to stop a weird man from killing the aforementioned high schoolers. It is somehow intensely convoluted while being the most barebones origin story ever. Cassie’s future sight is portrayed in the most annoying, difficult-to-understand way possible. However, like everything else in this movie, it is hilarious. So many scenes involve Cassie seeing jarring sequences of the main characters getting murdered in weirdly funny ways. There is a scene where the main villain punches a random dude for no reason. I don’t know why he does it. “Toxic” by Britney Spears is playing during that scene. Also, the main villain’s actor’s voice is basically never heard because he is obviously being dubbed over by a different guy. Doesn’t this sound absolutely unhinged? I wish I was making this up.

I felt like I was losing my mind watching this movie. This is a catastrophic system collapse on a wide scale; the superhero genre has been going through a rough patch recently and this feels like the ice caps melting. If there is ever a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie this insane, I think it will be the last one ever made. Still, in all honesty, I enjoyed watching this movie more than 11 movies from the MCU (I’ll never say which) and I am personally waiting with bated breath to see what new dumpster fire Sony is going to push out into their Spider-Manless Spider-Verse.