There’s something very important about movies that are “so bad it’s good” (henceforth SBIG) that a lot of people don’t understand. If you look up a list of these movies, you’ll find some titles that are indisputable: Troll 2, The Room, Battlefield: Earth. But you’ll also see people citing things like Sharknado and Birdemic, and although I think those could be argued to fall under this category, what those films are lacking is a sense of honesty, of earnestness. In the last fifteen years, I can’t think of a single film that was SBIG that disqualified itself from that qualifier by virtue of being too self-aware (not counting Neil Breen, who is the exception that proves the rule). A true SBIG can’t wink at the audience, can’t show its cards, can’t let you know that it’s in on the joke, because then it’s not true. Madame Web is perhaps the first mainstream, studio-released movie in nearly two decades that’s earned this distinction. Like fellow SBIG flick Showgirls, it succeeds by having a main character whose responses to their situation are so bizarre that they’re mesmerizing, and like 1998’s Lost in Space, it’s absolutely filled to the brim with endless ideas, almost all of which are terrible. I went into this movie thinking that it might have all been a ploy by Dakota Johnson to make people forget about her involvement with the Fifty Shades movies by making sure that Madame Web was the film they thought of when they thought of her name (because, admit it, you kinda had until I just mentioned it, hadn’t you?). But by the time that the credits rolled (to The Cranberries’ “Dreams,” inexplicably), I couldn’t wait to own this movie, and I may have to go and see it in theaters again. 

You probably already know what this one is about. Johnson portrays Cassie Webb, a paramedic whose precognitive powers are awakened by a near death experience. She begins to have visions of a man named Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim) killing three young women, Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Mattie (Celeste O’Connor), and Anya (Isabela Merced), and sets out to protect them from him. She begins to connect the dots—because her web connects them all—and realizes that she has a past, um, connection to Ezekiel via her mother as, say it with me now, “he was in the Amazon with [her] mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.” As she comes to realize, the mother that she has resented for her whole life (Kerry Bishé) for choosing to be deep in the Peruvian jungle—well, not that deep, since she doesn’t work up a sweat hiking to the same spot from a bus stop later in the film, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves—despite being in her last trimester was actually there doing said spider research to prevent Cassie from developing a life-threatening muscular disorder. Also, did I mention that it’s 2003? And did we also mention that Cassie’s partner in the FDNY is Ben Parker (Adam Scott), and that his sister-in-law Mary (Emma Roberts) is heavily pregnant? 

I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun in a theater. And here’s the thing: despite the incredible negative backlash that the movie has received, it’s actually not that bad. In fact, if this had come out in 1998, it would be one of the best blockbusters of that year. Venom didn’t hit for me, but what people seemed to like about that one was the absolute batshit performance from charm machine Tom Hardy, and this movie is similar insofar as the fact that Dakota Johnson is giving a really fun performance here. Cassie is a bizarre, antisocial weirdo, and I love that for her. Before she falls from a bridge into the water and has to be rescued, the child of someone that she helped save tries to give her a drawing that he made as a way of saying thanks, she behaves as if she’s never encountered a child before and that she thinks this one is trying to give her a manila envelope full of anthrax. Ben has to tell her to take it and just throw it away somewhere else later (Cassie: “I can’t even fold it, it’s like it’s cardboard.”). When one of the other tenants in her building calls her out for leaving her junk mail in the entryway for other people to deal with, Cassie says that there should be a recycling bin for it, but it’s clearly a defensive deflection rather than a passion for the environment. When she boards a train to attend a funeral in Poughkeepsie, a man next to her asks if he is aboard the train headed to Mount Vernon, and she replies “I hope not;” later, when she is fleeing from the ceiling-crawling Ezekiel, she ends up on another train where the same man is seated, who asks again if he’s on the wrong train, and she’s just like “Man, I don’t know,” and her tone is so disdainful that I couldn’t help but fall in love with this character. 

At Mary’s baby shower, Cassie is handed a Pepsi, and Johnson does some of the most bizarre business with a canned soda that you’ve ever seen. She already handled a Mountain Dew Code Red like it was poisoned earlier in the film, but she carries around this unopened Pepsi for almost an entire scene, holding it in one hand while making a claw shape with her other hand that sort of hovers over the top, but she never opens it. I mean this in the most loving way possible, but it honestly looks like Dakota Johnson may have never opened a coke before. I wouldn’t have it any other way. There’s even a scene where Cassie is sent home by a doctor after trying to get herself tested for her “weird deja vu,” and the doctor tells her to go home and lie on the couch and watch old movies until she feels better; in the next scene, she’s watching Alistair Sim’s A Christmas Carol. This movie is not set at Christmas; in fact, everyone dresses like it’s August or September. There’s a narrative reason for this, that they want to have Cassie talk back to the TV when Scrooge asks the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come “Are these the shadows of things that must be, or are they the shadows of things that might be?”, but the fact that she’s watching a Christmas movie in the middle of the year is psychotic. And that’s not even getting into the fact that, after rescuing the three girls, she promises them that she’s not abducting them, only to drive them straight to the woods (hilarious) and then tell them that she’ll be back in three hours because she has to go home and dig through her mother’s old journals for more info about “Las Arañas,” the secret Peruvian tribe of Spider People who get powers from spider bites. 

“Flawless” movies are rare, if they exist, but this one is flawful, and although that makes it delightful in many ways, I’m not going to pretend that there aren’t some things here that are actually bad. For whatever reason, Rahim is dubbed over in every single scene, and the performance in the ADR is so flat a marble wouldn’t roll off of it. In one of his first scenes, he seduces a woman at the opera and, after they show each other a good time, he awakes next to her from his nightly nightmare, in which a slightly more grey-haired version of himself is killed by the young women that he later pursues. The nightmare sequence is fun, even if it does make it seem like the girls are not going to grow up to be heroes despite the costumes they wear and powers they display, as they do straight up murder him in his vision, but what’s even better is that he relates all of this to the woman in bed with him, babbling, talking about having foreseen his death every time he sleeps for decades. It is revealed that he targeted her specifically, as she has access to NSA tech that he can get his hacker employee (Zosia Mamet) to use to find his victims, but even before he reveals this, she should have been on her way out of the door based purely on his nonsense conspiracy talk, but she was clearly putting up with his conspiracy gobbledygook because she wanted to go a second round, and I respect that. 

The exposition is as inorganic as it could possibly be, the contemporary technology does things that are hilariously impossible, the dubbing is bad, and there are a dozen other things that you can find to complain about if that’s what movies are to you — things to complain about. That’s a way, but it isn’t my way. Maybe I just have big dumb baby brain and every time a scene opened with a shot through some kind of web-like obstruction (breezeblocks, lacy curtains, chain-link fencing, actual cobwebs on chain link fencing) or spiderwebs were evoked in broken glass or the structure of a window was the equivalent of having keys jangled in front of my face, because I was thoroughly entertained. Her web really does connect us all, and in the years to come when the immediate backlash dies down, I expect that this one will get a critical re-evaluation in the same vein as Showgirls. At long last, its hour come round again, another truly great bad movie has entered the chat. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond