The First ‘Madame Web’ Reviews Throw Down Over Whether The Dakota Johnson Movie Is Worse Than ‘Morbius’ (But, Yeah, Probably)

The first reactions to Madame Web are finally allowed to spin their webs less than 24 hours before the film makes a Valentine’s Day premiere. The general consensus: Not great.

Starring Dakota Johnson, Madame Web is the latest entry in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, i.e. the superhero films featuring Spider-Man characters but never Spider-Man. While that formula found success with Venom, it reached a low point with Morbius, and well, Madame Web hasn’t helped in that regard.

As you can see by the first batch of social media reactions, people are having a hard time deciding if Madame Web is better or worse than Morbius, which is obviously not a great sign:

As for the critics, the situation didn’t improve there as Madame Web appears to be either offensively tepid or an outright disaster.

You can see what the reviews for Madame Web are saying below:

David Fear, Rolling Stone:

Having now seen this tangled-up I.P. gossamer first-hand, we can say that Madame Web isn’t as bad as its somewhat botched promotional campaign might suggest. It is, in fact, way worse. A genuine Chernobyl-level disaster that seems to get exponentially more radioactive as it goes along, this detour to one of the dustier corners of Marvel’s content farm is a dead-end from start to finish. It is the Cats: The Movie of superhero movies. Not a single decision seems of sound mind. Not a single performance feels in sync with the material. Not a single line reading feels as if it hasn’t somehow been magically auto-tuned to subtract emotion and/or inflection. The sole amazing factor of this Spider-spinoff is that someone, somewhere signed off on actually releasing it.

Germain Lussier, io9:

Madame Web is a two-hour trailer for the movie you think you’re watching, but actually aren’t. If that’s confusing, welcome to the world of Madame Web, where everyone—the characters, the actors, the audience, and everyone in between—is confused about basically everything, all of the time. It’s a film that sets specific expectations in terms of story and payoff, proceeds to seed and tease those payoffs throughout the movie, and then never delivers on them. When a film has to pretend to be something it’s not to keep you interested, that’s not a good sign, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg with Madame Web.

David Ehrlich, IndieWire:

An inoffensive, almost endearingly lame whiff of a movie that has the misfortune of arriving at a time when the superhero genre has almost returned to pre-MCU levels of popularity, this “Daredevil”-ass disaster is hilariously retrograde for a story about someone who discovers that she can see a few seconds into the future (it’s also deliciously ironic for a project that was rushed into production at a time when studio films about spider-people still seemed like automatic eight-legged hits). But at least “Daredevil” was goofy on purpose. From its lack of stakes to its absence of style, and from its laughable CGI to its palpable discomfort with the rhythms and tropes of its genre, “Madame Web” is a superhero movie that feels like it was made by and for people who have never seen a modern superhero movie. In theory, that might have been a blessing in disguise. In practice, only Johnson is able to make it seem that way.

Witney Seibold, SlashFilm:

I can’t imagine “Madame Web” not being a massive disappointment to many superhero fans, as I hesitate to describe it as a superhero film. It’s more like a pre-origin story, a tale of who various Spider-Women were before they got their powers. Audiences are treated to several flashes-forward to the time when they’ll be in costume, but “Madame Web” isn’t about how they got their powers or stitched together their outfits. It’s merely about the assurance that they will indeed be heroes someday. As such, there’s no “Big Fight” at the film’s climax. There’s no prolonged scene of equally matched heroes wailing on each other using carefully choreographed martial arts.

Hoai-Tran Bui, Inverse:

It was only by a miracle of casting that the Venom movies managed to take off thanks to Tom Hardy’s gonzo dual performances as Eddie Brock and his codependent symbiote, as well as his keen understanding of camp. Sony has been trying to replicate that bizarre chemistry ever since, but it turns out that you can’t synthesize camp in a lab. Not even a meme could save Morbius from being an utterly dull drag. And not even Dakota Johnson’s truly uninspired line delivery could turn Madame Web into anything more than a feature film version of a studio note.

However, Madame Web’s most heinous crime might be the fact that the infamous “researching spiders in the Amazon” line never actually surfaces in the movie. We don’t even know how to react to this information.

“In the actual film, newly clairvoyant paramedic Cassie Web (Dakota Johnson) does not say ‘he was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died,’” Richard Lawson writes for Vanity Fair. “All of those words are in the movie, directed with both flair and helplessness by S. J. Clarkson, but they are never strung together in that order.”

Madame Web opens in theaters on February 14.