The Superhero Genre Just Got Its First Camp Classic

If Marvel is the Coke of superhero movies and DC is the Pepsi, Sony is the RC Cola, a passable substitute when they’re out of what you really want. Although the studio has had the rights to Spider-Man, one of the most iconic characters in comic-book history, since the end of the 1990s, it spent much of the 2010s struggling to convert that prize property into a watchable movie, let alone an expandable franchise. After Sony struck a deal to incorporate Spidey into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and especially after it cast the buoyant Tom Holland, the character’s fortunes soared. (2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home is the seventh-highest-grossing movie of all time.) But the studio was left in a peculiar position, owning both Spider-Man and the 60-plus years’ worth of secondary characters that have populated his world but unable to use them in the same movies. The result, beginning with 2018’s Venom, has been a singularly strange series of films that take place in a world built around a figure whose name cannot be uttered within it, like a production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead where no one thought to check in advance who owned the rights to Hamlet.

While the previous DC Universe has wound down in preparation for next year’s Superman-led reboot and Marvel has kicked all but one of its movies into 2025 as the company tries to reverse its precipitous loss of audiences, Sony has three comic-book movies on tap between now and November, claiming for itself the lowest point in the genre’s fortunes since at least 2007. RC Colas for everyone!

The first of those is Madame Web, and boy, it is a doozy. Its mockable, memeable trailer had prepared me for the worst, and on that level, at least, it did not disappoint. Directed by S.J. Clarkson and starring Dakota Johnson as Cassandra Webb, a paramedic who gains the ability to see the future after a drowning accident, the movie is marginally competent at its best, and at its worst, it’s 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.

For as often as movie critics are accused of having rarified taste, of just not liking anything, the opposite can also be true. Seeing hundreds of movies a year for years on end can lead to a condition where you place too much value on novelty, and even a minor twist on a worn-out formula feels like a life raft in a sea of sameness. It shouldn’t be a big deal, or even particularly noteworthy, that Madame Web takes place in a version of New York that actually feels like New York, or that its action sequences are spatially coherent and largely free of computer-generated murk. But by the recent standards of the genre, even its occasional jankiness comes as a pleasant change of pace. It’s the kind of superhero movie they made before superhero movies were all they made, disreputable and messy and kind of a hoot.

To be clear: Madame Web is bad. Really bad. As in, most of the main villain’s dialogue seems to have been dubbed by an actor who doesn’t particularly sound like him. Johnson may not mouth the now-infamous line from the trailer about how her mother was in the Amazon researching spiders right before she died, but she does pull out a valise crammed with her mother’s old notebooks and murmur, “Hope the spiders were worth it, Mom.”

Just as the dire and humorless Morbius ended with the promise of a team-up between Jared Leto’s living vampire and Michael Keaton’s Vulture (ported in, for reasons never to be explained, from the universe of Spider-Man: Homecoming) and Venom 2 ended with Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock getting zapped into the MCU to set up a crossover that seems unlikely to ever happen, so Madame Web is infused with the promise that the next movie will be the good one. In the movie that actually exists, Cassie is tasked with saving three teenage girls (played by Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O’Connor, and Isabela Merced) from being murdered by Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), whose own visions of the future show the girls’ grown-up versions killing him. Like Cassie, Ezekiel has gained powers from the bite of a Peruvian arachnid worshipped by a tribe known as Las Arañas, which the movie helpfully and non-litigiously translates as the Spider-People. (Naturally, some of those people are indeed -Men.) In both Cassie’s and Ezekiel’s visions, the three girls grow up to be various versions of a crime-fighting webslinger, one with mechanical legs protruding from her back, another whose wrists shoot meshes of electricity, but these glimpses of the future are so vague and hazy you have to indulge in some post-film Googling to figure out whom they’re meant to be playing (briefly: two Spider-Women and a Spider-Girl). You can only imagine the buzzy young actresses’ agents informing them they’ve been cast to play a superhero, only for them to later realize they spent 90 percent of the movie flouncing around in schoolgirl uniforms and getting their necks broken. Johnson, for her part, infects every scene with a dry sense of remove, as if she can’t believe she’s doing this either.

So many superhero movies, even the decent ones, approach audiences as if they’re directives issued from command central: You watch because you have no choice not to. But there’s no cost to missing Madame Web, except for passing up a hilarious couple of hours in a theater. The mainline MCU movies are self-conscious to a fault, full of quips and winks, but 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.