On Valentine’s Day, we get reminded of the reassuring phrase, “There is someone out there for everyone.” Well, when it comes to movies, the same is true: For every film, there’s at least some who genuinely like it — even Madame Web, which opened nationally on the romantic holiday to scathing reviews and a modest box office.
So while critics and superhero fans online continue to pile on (including The Hollywood Reporter … and perhaps too much), and in the spirit of showing a little love, we sifted through the 21 positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes (where the film currently sits at 13 percent “Fresh”) to get some alternative opinions about the Sony-Marvel title, which stars Dakota Johnson as a New York paramedic who develops psychic powers.
It’s worth remembering even truly disastrous films can entertain — Paul Verhoeven’s much-derided 1995 film Showgirls, for example, is famously hilarious when viewed as an unintended comedy. And a critic for Slate saw Madame Web precisely the same way, writing that the movie is destined to be a camp classic: “An incoherent mishmash populated by slumming movie stars who make little effort to disguise the dawning realization that they’ve made a terrible mistake. It’s a travesty, a disaster, a blight on the history of superheroes and cinema itself. I enjoyed the hell out of it … Madame Web is thoroughly un-self-aware, the rare modern movie that achieves the status of pure camp without meaning to. It might not be the kind of fun its makers intended it to be, but that doesn’t make it any less of a good time.”
The L.A. Times likewise praised the film as “the purest form of camp” but thought that Johnson’s performance suggests she’s at least somewhat in on the joke: “As Cassie, Johnson is so compellingly weird that you can’t take your eyes off her. She delivers every clunker of a line with her full chest voice and a twinkle in her eye. The three other gals — Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O’Connor and Isabela Merced — well, they were clearly cast for a potential future standalone film, which has to be DOA at this point. They’re all a bit awkward and forced, and none are working on the galaxy-brain level of Johnson … Johnson gets it, and for those who do as well, it’s kind of a thrill to get tangled in her web.”
Another review marked as “Fresh” by Rotten Tomatoes is from KGET, which wrote, “Madame Web is such a horrific mess that it makes The Marvels look like an Oscar contender” — oh, wait. The critic gave the movie a D-. In other words, one of the few “Fresh” reviews for Madame Web appears to be miscategorized as positive.
But those reviews are sort-of cheating. What about sincerely positive reviews for Madame Web — not ironic camp appreciation and not miscategorizations. Aren’t there any of those? Yes, and their common thread seems to be critics who enjoyed that the film was at least trying to deliver something different than simply following the usual and all-too-familiar Marvel-DC playbook of tropes.
One is from The Washington Post, no less, which gave Madame Web a passing grade of 2.5 stars. The Post praised the film as “surprisingly low-key” with “refreshingly little of the testosteronal bluster, bombast and ballistics of most comic-book movies” and that the film, “in its own quiet way, it manages to break down a few barriers.”
RogerEbert.com also gave the movie a 2.5, insisting it’s “not the unmitigated disaster that its clunky trailer or its calendar spot in February would suggest” and praised it as “blissfully breezy in its pacing, which helps make it a more enjoyable watch than some of the super-serious, end-of-the-world fare we often see” and said director S.J. Clarkson, “keeps things moving at an exciting clip with fluid camera movements and high-energy transitions.”
In another 2.5 grade, ComicBook.com wrote, “Madame Web might not contain the heart-pumping tension, massive franchise connections, or painfully authentic verisimilitude of many of its modern contemporaries, it makes a convincing argument that an entertaining-enough story can still be found outside of those traits. The charisma of its lead heroines and the specificity of its premise prevent it from being too boring, too goofy, or too irredeemable to ignore.”
The National News said Madame Web “doesn’t seem particularly interested in being a great superhero movie. It is not particularly committed to the tropes or trappings of the genre at all. Rather than that being an out-and-out weakness, it is something that makes the film stand out – for better and worse – in an oversaturated and wrung-out superhero blockbuster landscape. In fact, while it is far from perfect, Sony’s latest attempt to start its own live action Spider-Verse is at its strongest when it is embracing the strange supernatural-tinged teen thriller it really wants to be.”
So there you have it. Not an unmitigated disaster, a potential breezy low-key viewing experience, and, quite possibly, a camp classic destined for midnight screenings.
