This Madame Web review is sponsored by Pepsi. When I need a refreshing beverage to save the day by quenching my thirst, I always reach for a can of ice cold Pepsi. Anyways, let’s dive in, shall we?
If this movie had been half as entertaining as Dakota Johnson’s press tour, we might’ve had something worthwhile. Unfortunately, what we got is an embarrassing, thoughtless, borderline unreleasable mess that closer resembles some sort of tax write-off than it does a feature film. This is the cinematic embodiment of everything wrong with modern big studio productions. Is it one of the worst movies of all time? I wouldn’t go that far, but it is absolutely one of the worst comic book movies ever released.
Somewhere, deep beneath the many glaring issues with the film, was potential to tell an empowering female lead origin story. Madame Web’s abilities are interesting, and could’ve led to some fun sequences where she had to learn to adapt on the fly to each foreseen death. Instead, the movie offers a murky and convoluted explanation of what exactly her powers are, and how they work. The complete lack of thought that went into the handful of action sequences involving her clairvoyance is inexcusable. Almost all of these moments are riddled with continuity errors and lack any sense of logic.
The characters are so poorly written and developed too. Nothing feels earned and there’s no real sense of payoff to anyone’s arcs. In fact, apart from Dakota Johnson’s Cassie Web, none of the other girls have arcs at all - well, unless you consider learning CPR to be strong character development. The villain here is about as flat and generic as a bad guy gets. Not once are we given a real driving force behind his actions. At one point he says something along the lines of “they’ll destroy everything I’ve built”, but, we never get any indication of what that actually is. The whole movie is plagued with awful writing and dialogue like that, but hey; at least some of it was unintentionally hilarious.
The visual and audio work doesn’t gain the movie any good will either. The CGI is underwhelming, and the blurry, tunnel vision filter used in the frequent vision sequences looks straight up awful. I also can’t remember the last time I watched a movie with this many camera cuts. The action isn’t well orchestrated to begin with, but hacking it up with so many edits makes it even worse. It’s normal for big production like this to rely on ADR for some of the dialogue, but there are so many instances here where it doesn’t even seem like they tried to match the actors’ mouth movements.
It’s wild that within the span of less than a year, Sony set the benchmark so high with Across the Spider-verse, and sunk to a new low with Madame Web. There’s no excuse for something of this quality coming from such a big studio. If you thought Morbius was bad, you haven’t seen anything yet.
1/5
Review by: Benjamin Garrett
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