“I’ve seen that man before, Ezekiel Sims. He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died. / Whatever the future holds. We’ll be ready. And you know the best thing about the future … It hasn’t happened yet.”
Every year just before the Academy Awards crown the highlights of last year’s cinematic achievements, another organization decides to champion the cause of the camp, crap and critically panned films. This is the mission of the Razzie awards: to shame Hollywood’s artisans into putting a $4.97 spray painted statue of a raspberry on their shelf, eternally reminding them of their greatest professional failures. From 2019’s “Cats” to M. Night Shyamalan’s 2010 remake of “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” no box office bomb is safe from their ire.
This year, the Razzies have elected to award the 2024 film “Madame Web” this most dubious honor of Worst Picture, beating out other notable duds such as “Megalopolis” and “Joker: Folie à Deux” for the top prize. It also took home Worst Screenplay and Worst Actress.
“Madame Web” is the story of how an unlikable woman named Cassandra Webb (played by Dakota Johnson, star of the critically panned “50 Shades of Grey” film series) gets blinded and paralyzed after almost two agonizing hours of runtime.
The plot follows Webb as she works as an ambulance driver with her more interesting coworker, Uncle Ben Parker (played by Adam Scott, star of the 2020-2025 show “Severance” and the only redeeming factor in this entire movie). She almost drowns and ends the film early, but Ben had to prolong our suffering just a bit more by saving her life. She soon discovers that she has some interesting powers of clairvoyance and visions of the future.
Her entire point in the plot is to tell more interesting characters what to do. She has very little agency and just serves as a way to propel the “narrative” forward. The three girls (played by Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O’Connor) are supposedly being hunted down by a man in a black Spider-Man costume named Ezekiel Sims (played by Tahir Rahim). Apparently, he was researching spiders with Webb’s mother in the Amazon right before she died.
Skipping over a prolonged sequence where the girls dance to Britney Spears’ hit song “Toxic” in a roadside diner, the final battle takes place in front of a large, obnoxious Pepsi-Cola sign. It is one of the most obvious examples of product placement I have seen in a movie all year. Also, Peter Parker is randomly born during the movie’s runtime, as the filmmakers assumed we are unwilling to care about these Spider-Man adjacent characters without the web-head himself showing up in one form or another.
This film has editing, as is abundantly apparent whenever we are subjected to the use of Madame Web’s powers. The direction by S.J. Clarkson was unmemorable and unmotivated, and I would have elected to have given her the Razzie for Worst Director this year, but she was spared their ire in favor of Francis Ford Coppola for “Megalopolis.”
Who in their right mind thought that making a movie about Madame Web, of all characters, would be a good idea? I know the other characters have names, I just don’t care. I prefer reviewing actual movies and pieces of cinema. At least 2022’s “Morbius” was ironically enjoyable from a distance, something that not even this movie can muster at any point during its runtime. I implore you, the reader, to do something better with your time than watch this garbage. My final rating for “Madame Web” is an abysmal 1/10.