Madame Web reviews: what have critics said about latest Sony Spider-Man film - is it another Morbius?

It was always going to be an uphill battle for Sony’s latest Spider-Man spinoff Madame Web, but even so the critics have been overwhelmingly negative.

The film is the latest entry in Sony's Spider-Man Universe, following Venom, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, and the very poorly received Morbius. It follows Cassandra Webb, a clairvoyant paramedic who forges a relationship with three young women who develop their own Spidey-like powers. 

With a cast of characters that no-one outside of the comic book fandom is likely to have heard of, and as the fourth instalment of a mediocre franchise at best, Madame Web could be in contention as one of the worst superhero films of the last 20 years, according to the critics.

What do the Madame Web reviews say?

The reviews are in for Madame Web, and it’s pretty conclusive as all the top reviewers agree that this movie is the latest in a long line of superhero duds.

Writing for The Guardian, Benjamin Lee described the movie’s lead Dakota Johnson as a ‘checked out leading lady’, and called the Spider-Man spinoff a ‘tangled mess’, giving it one star.

IndieWire went in with both studs calling the film ‘An inoffensive, almost endearingly lame whiff of a movie’ adding that it felt as if it had been made in 2003 before the superhero genre took off, comparing it to the critically panned Daredevil movie of that year.

The Hollywood Reporter continued in much the same vein, writing that the film was an ‘airless and stilted endeavour’, though did find something to praise in the way the movie dealt with the way in which American citizens voluntarily surrender personal freedoms in the name of national security. Though the review continued that Madame Web otherwise ‘failed to deliver at every turn’.

And if these reviews weren’t bad enough to put you off, Rolling Stone was on typical form stating: “Isn’t As Bad As You’ve Heard. It’s So Much Worse.”

On review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, Madame Web has a Tomatometer score of 17% based on 87 critical reviews - in comparison last year's mega-flop The Marvels has a score of 62%, and Morbius, a film ridiculed online for being almost unbelievably terrible, is on 15%.