Netflix’s best and worst new #1 movie is ‘The Room’ of superhero movies

These days the movies at the top of Netflix’s top 10 list are mostly features they’ve acquired through licensing deals. And that goes for our current #1 pick, a superhero movie from Sony. And easily overbear superhero movie in probably three decades, Madame Web. But it’s a movie that falls right into the “it’s so bad it’s good” category, and it remains my second favorite movie experience of the year, behind Dune Part 2.

How can I describe how confusing Madame Web is? Sony is trying to continue making Spider-Man spin-offs but without their own Spider-Man, with the character on loan from the MCU. There have been talks of integrating the MCU with Holland appearing or even bringing back someone like Andrew Garfield as the universe’s Spider-Man, but none of that has materialized. Instead, we have projects like Madame Web, where Sony clearly has no idea what to do in this world at this point.

Madame Web, played by Dakota Johnson, who seems to have a joke here, receives spider-powers from her mother, who was bitten by a magical spider in the Amazon that had previously given powers to an indigenous race of spider-people there. Yes seriously.

But her powers aren’t terribly useful. She isn’t strong or fast and can’t pull webs, instead she has a modified version of Spider-sense where she can rewind time for a minute or two to try and change the effect to something.

The film tasks her with protecting three future Spider-Women from a spider-powered villain, Ezekiel Sims, who believes he will be killed in the future because he had a dream about it. He’s the only one in the entire movie with actual spider powers, but he’s just strong and gooey and doesn’t actually shoot webs.

Since Madame Web has no real physical powers, and neither do the girls who keep running away, she has to resort to things like hitting Sims with cars (this happens a lot) or going back in time so random things like debris to hit him.

There’s also a completely unnecessary side story here where Madame Web’s EMT partner is a young Uncle Ben (this is in the 90s) whose wife gives birth to Peter Parker. So yeah, the only time we’ve seen Spider-Man in the entire Sony universe is as a newborn.

It’s just an incredibly bad movie, but one that attracted surprise talent like it-girl Sydney Sweeney as one of the powerless Spider-girls, all three of whom are seen in their actual costumes for no more than 45 seconds, and only in the dream/ future sequences. So don’t expect any big moment for them to get a power up or a fight scene from them. It never happens, and this movie never has a sequel I will happen.

Madame Web is just an incredible, amazingly bad, but hugely entertaining movie. I would recommend watching it with friends so you don’t laugh alone. I don’t regret watching it in the way you’d be sorry to say, Morbius or Ant Man: Quantumania or Shazam 2, as it’s just so hilariously bad.

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