Cassandra Webb isn’t your typical hero.
Sure, this quiet and solemn thirtysomething paramedic spends her days helping and saving others. But she has zero desire to do anything but remain incognito.
Cassie’s quite content to perform CPR, patch up a gushing wound, and then leave the smiling, comforting and gladhanding to her partner, Ben. It’s not that she’s just an introvert, either. She simply doesn’t want to get emotionally involved. Ever.
Of course, you don’t always get what you want. And Cassie recently got something she’d rather not have. You could call it a sense of premonition or a special power of déjà vu.
It started after she drowned during a rescue. She died for a minute or two. But then Ben resuscitated her, and Cassie awoke with this odd ability to see short snippets of the future. She watches these future visions that quickly rewind, catching her up in mini time loops.
Cassie went to see a handful of doctors, and the best they could tell her was it was a mental glitch caused by her recent trauma. But this is no glitch. This is misery. For one thing, she can’t control those time loops. For another, they sometimes play over and over until she does something.
When she sees a guy on the train grab a teen girl by the neck, stab another and beat a third to the floor, she can’t just turn away. Well, she can. But after those brutal moments rewind and happen for a second time she has no choice. So, during a repeat, Cassie stands and hustles the bewildered teens off the train before the baddie shows up.
Somehow this superpowered guy spots their actions, slips out of the moving train and starts crawling in their direction … on the ceiling of the station!
There’s a purposeful, deadly glare in his eyes. This wasn’t some accidental, wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time meeting. This guy wants these girls dead. And now Cassie is in his sights, too.
That’s what she gets for being helpful. And right about now the most heroic thing Cassie Web can think of doing is to scream out: Run!
Even after getting the girls out of the station, Cassie’s first thought is to send them home and let their parents deal with the problem. But several circumstances make that impossible. The girls then plead for Cassie’s help, and she gives it, eventually stepping up and putting her life on the line while using her developing abilities to protect them.
For their part, the three teens—Julia, Anya and Mattie—are often less-than-wise in their choices. They tend to leap into rebellious and foolish actions. But in time, the teens grasp the seriousness of their circumstances. They make an effort to protect each other and Cassie.
Early on, Cassie is very angry with her mother, who died in childbirth. She blames her for caring for her research more than she cared for Cassie. But with new information, Cassie is able to forgive her mom and to embrace her newfound memories.
Cassie’s paramedic partner, Ben, is a great guy who’s always ready to support those around him. He saves Cassandra’s life and goes out of his way when she needs an assist with the teen girls. He also looks after his very pregnant sister when her husband is out of town. (Fans of Spider-Man will likely catch who Ben Parker is supposed to become. But the movie doesn’t give us much in the way of detail here.)
Cassie’s mysterious, time-rewinding powers aren’t spiritual per se. But when she drowns and dies briefly, she has visions of an otherworldly dimension. It’s implied that her abilities are all connected to this mystical realm. Cassie eventually learns that her experiences tie her to a certain Peruvian spider, one whose venom contains mystical, psychotropic properties. She also learns that her mother discovered the species in Peru.
In fact, we learn that Casie’s mom was betrayed and killed by Ezekiel Sims—the man currently hunting Cassie and the three teens—over this spider. It gave Sims his extra-human abilities as well. Cassie’s abilities are time-focused, while Sims’ powers are centered on super strength and wall crawling. Sims is, however, driven by visions of his death at the hands of three young women dressed in spider-like gear.
A spider-person in Peru helps Cassie delve into visions of her mother in the past. She learns of the woman’s real choices and is able to physically embrace (mystically) the mom she never knew. Later, Cassie expands her abilities to the point of being able to control her visions and project multiple spirit-like versions of herself to interact with people in the physical world.
Sims meets and seduces a woman, taking her back to his apartment. They kiss passionately and then we skip to them lying in bed. He’s shirtless and she is dressed in a bra.
Two of the teens, Anya and Mattie, wear midriff-baring tops. And later, Mattie convinces the more-demure Julia to tie up her shirt as well so they all can flirt with some teen boys. The girls end up dancing on the boy’s table at a local diner while the guys lustily cheer them on.
Cassie wears a low-cut tank top.
Sims has a vision of three Spider-Girls dressed in superhero gear, and they beat him up in a thumping four-way battle. Cassie also smashes into the superstrong Sims with several speeding vehicles, crashing through buildings and glass windows to bash and pin him down. Someone is thrust through a window and falls many stories, presumably dying.
However, most of the death-dealing here is delivered by Sims himself. He shoots a crew of people in an effort to get his hands on something valuable (in one case shooting someone in the forehead.) (Cassie’s mom gets shot as well; she’s rescued and kept alive long enough to give birth to her daughter.) Sims attacks and kills several cops with superhuman slams and poison.
Sims repeatedly and graphically brutalizes the teen girls Julia, Anya and Mattie. He strangles them, poisons them, lifts them by the necks and slams them down on the floor and tabletops. In one instance, Sims smashes a teen’s head on a countertop and snaps her neck. He impales a girl and appears to shoot another. Sims also jams a large knife into Cassie’s abdomen.
A building full of explosives is ignited, resulting in numerous explosions and fires. A large metal billboard gets ripped apart in this chaos and heavy beams fall on people. Someone is crushed beneath a huge, electrified letter from that sign. Someone else is hit in the face with an explosive blast, rendering them blind.
A helicopter spirals to the ground after an explosive round hits it. Cars crash into one another. A speeding dump truck plows into an ambulance. Cassie pulls the injured driver out of the emergency vehicle and tries to staunch his gushing wounds. She steps away covered in the man’s blood. Cassie drowns twice and is brought back through CPR in both cases. Sims is hit by the shock from a defibrillator. People are bitten by spiders. A bird smashes into a closed window, breaking its neck.
Five s-words along with one or two uses each of the words “a–,” “a–hole” and “b–ch.”
God’s and Jesus’ names are misused a dozen times total (God being combined with “d–n” once).
A number of people drink bottles of beer at a baby shower.
Sims has the ability to inject his victims with a poisonous neurotoxin. He uses it to poison several people, slowly killing one. We also learn that the Peruvian spider’s venom has healing properties. It’s used to heal someone of a neuromuscular disorder.
In the course of running away, Cassie steals a city cab and an ambulance. Mattie repeatedly rebels against authority, at one point using an obscene gesture.
Madame Web is one of those Sony produced and MCU-adjacent movie titles. That means that it shares the same tangled web with other Spider-Verse characters, such as Venom and Morbius, without actually (up to this point) introducing Peter Parker/Spider-Man into any of the web-slinging action.
In fact, this latest pic in that Sony collection leans into a much broader Spider-Man mythos, suggesting there’s far more than just one radioactive spider destined to bite one teen guy (in the many multiverses, of course). Accordingly, this pic lets us in on a wide set of special spider possibilities in the world.
But hey, that’s what comic books do, right? They dream up new, possibilities for new story ideas. And Madame Web is definitely a comic book movie of that stripe. It’s fast paced, explosive, and it contains very, very little logical sense.
Unlike a Venom movie, however, when someone is killed here, time might be rewound, and that deadly stab to a teen’s chest or young girl’s broken neck would never happen. Sorta.
That, however, is what parents will have to navigate. There’s self-sacrifice and heroic action aplenty, along with nods toward friends supporting each other in times of need. But no matter how you spin it, it’s the brutal violence against teen girls that makes this movie … sticky.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
