Madame Web 2024

I'm not a huge fan of the LITERAL MAGIC characters in the MCU so I really hope they keep this out of it. I'll just ignore the fact that we saw the birth of Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man :clown:

Why did the villain just immediately kill everyone at the camp to steal the spider? At that point he wouldn't even have known if the spider did anything! They never even try to explain his motives or where he even got his knowledge. He was just "the bad guy"

Why didn't Web take the kids to the police station immediately after the subway-thing? Isn't that the normal human thing to do?

The villain had ~10 years until he was supposedly going to be killed by the kids, so why didn't he use even a single second to plan anything? He just went into a crowd full of people in broad daylight. I don't even understand how he could become wealthy and powerful with so poor impulse control!

Have you ever used fireworks? In that fireworks-factory one of those rockets EXPLODED A HOLE IN A BRICK WALL :upside_down:

There were a bunch of annoyances for me so I won't write all day here, but most of all the voice dubbing of the main villain was super annoying. His English must have been completely unintelligible for them to use ADR for every single scene, but I would have preferred badly spoken dialogue to this. The ADR never failed to bring me out of the movie because you can clearly see his lips being out of sync.

Oh and why on earth did they end up using those glasses? Wow, those are definitely the ugliest glasses I have ever seen. I really hope they were some kind of special prescription things from the doctor :rofl:

In the end I didn't really connect with anyone, and the Web actor didn't feel very invested either, maybe it was just a paycheck? This one might have been better to do as a series, I don't know...

Film 75 (Goal: 300) of 2024

I'm probably going to lose what little reputation I have at this point, but I actually enjoyed Madame Web... to an extent. Now it's very likely that because I went in with absolutely no expectations, due to terrible trailers, terrible reviews and the history of Sony's terrible attempt at a Universe, that my enjoyment factor was significantly higher - but I enjoyed this more than some of the MCU's recent offerings (I'm looking at you Black Panther 2, Ant-Man 3 and The Marvels).

That being said, Is it perfect? No way. Is it even very good? Nope. The action in this is probably the biggest culprit. Whether it was lack of budget or just no ability to shoot action but the action scenes throughout the majority of the film are poorly put together, and edited quickly together. And when it comes to the big end of film climax, this is where it most rears its ugly head. The script isn't great either, I'll acknowledge that. There's a head scratching moment when a known fugitive is able to get from the US to South America and back in a short timeframe. This movie is set only a few years after 9/11 as well where that kind of thing was at an all-time high.

The lead 4 girls are all good. After Sweeney's most recent turn in Anyone But You, this film goes against that by having her play a reserved school girl. Not sure it works. Isabela Merced continues to be someone to watch for the future - though she isn't given a lot to do here. Celeste O'Connor is decent but feels lost due to the script among her bigger stars.

It's another miss overall from the Sony universe. Admittedly, I liked it more than some of their other recent entries (Morbius, Venom 2, etc.) but given the wealth of stories in the extensive and rich Spider-Man universe, is this really the best Sony can put out?

It’s been a rough few years for Marvel on screen. Despite my opinion that The Marvels was a great time, it fell far short of expectations on a huge budget, and Quantumania flopped at the start of the year with another massive budget and disastrous results both on screen and at the box office. Though Madame Web was not produced by Marvel Studios, I – and most of the world – have had a bad feeling about the perception of this movie ever since the first trailer dropped. It truly never stood a chance: up against the fall from public grace of Marvel properties across the board, and with a writing team known for bombs like 2022’s Morbius and 2017’s Power Rangers, Madame Web was set up for failure from day one. It was already at such a disadvantage that it would have been an uphill battle even if the film had ended up being stellar – something that may have happened in another universe, but certainly not this one. You didn’t exactly need the title character’s powers of foresight to see where this was going.

Madame Web is, essentially, a setup for things to come – or that Sony hopes are to come. In the 1970s, a team is researching spiders in the Amazon for their effects on the human body. Constance Web (Kerry Bishé) is interested in their healing properties, and Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), not so much. After a betrayal, Constance is cared for by Amazonian tribesmen who showcase the effects of this spider venom before she gives birth and passes away. Thirty years later, Cassie Web (Dakota Johnson) is a paramedic in New York City who begins to experience psychic visions that she does not understand. It begins with brief flashes of reliving a few seconds, but soon evolves into seeing things hours ahead of time. Acting upon visions he’s been granted by spider venom, Ezekiel Sims has spent the years since the Amazon incident hunting three young women who he believes will one day kill him. When Cassie and the three girls all find themselves on the same train to Poughkeepsie, Ezekiel attacks and sets a conflict into motion that is at times meandering, other times frenetic, and ultimately, meaningless – but we’ll get to that.

The hard thing about this film is that it is not nearly as bad, at least, as I was expecting it to be. It’s a passable origin story that clearly has its ambitions set on a sequel (most of the characters pictured don’t even have their super powers by the end of the movie) and establishes a team of super-powered women that Sony certainly is hoping to hang its hat on. There are just several things getting in the way of this movie being successful. Action scenes fall, for the most part, somewhere in between confusing and interesting. For every moment where the editing was slick and actually did a pretty good job of communicating the psychic slips that Cassie’s mind was having, there was a slapdash hack job leaving you wondering what character was standing where or who said what. (The ADR in this movie is absolutely heinous, particularly in scenes with Tahar Rahim as Ezekiel Sims.) The final sequence of a battle on top of a fireworks warehouse is especially guilty of this, as characters are dodging explosions and debris and suddenly you’ve lost track of all of them. Even small things, like a bad cut of a character removing their mask, are just sloppy. It’s also difficult to really make the big set pieces feel like superhero showdowns when only two of the five characters participating actually have powers.

The story itself is rather interesting, but when it’s propelled by characters delivering the most banal lines in the wildest situations, it saps the plot of any excitement or energy. There’s no way around it: the screenplay feels like it’s written by someone who doesn’t understand what a normal conversation sounds like. It also doesn’t help that most of the cast appeared to either know that the lines they were delivering were poorly written, or were otherwise entirely uninterested in this gig. Not a single performance was dimensional or engaging – particularly painful were Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, and Emma Roberts. Even Adam Scott, who I’m typically very fond of (thanks Party Down and Severance) feels flat here. The screenwriters had the chance to really examine questions of fate versus free will, or of the inevitability of destiny with Cassie’s powers of clairvoyance; but we don’t really get any of that. Instead, it is a mostly fine, altogether safe, and standard intro to new stock characters with powers just vague enough to be twisted in whatever way the plot calls for. They also had every opportunity to make sure that we, as the audience, understood that this is the Sony Spider-verse we’re looking at here (Adam Scott is playing Ben Parker here – that’s right, Uncle Ben to Tom Holland’s Peter Parker), but I had no clue. It wasn’t until I was reading up on it for this review that I learned that this is 2003 in that timeline, years before Peter gets his powers. We’re mostly left wondering why no one is mentioning the striking resemblance Ezekiel’s costume bears to your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, or why an Amazonian tribe getting powers from spider venom seems so inexplicably foreign to these characters.

When I say that this movie is meaningless, it’s not because it’s devoid of anything fun or enjoyable – there were moments that I was engaged. I say it purely because of the reality of the industry. As I mentioned above, even if this movie was incredible, it was never going to perform well at the box office, and as a result, any sequels planned in advance are most likely going to end up getting the chop. That means that all of the leg work that this movie is doing in introducing these characters is, in all likelihood, for naught. I don’t like to write preemptive obituaries, and perhaps this weekend’s bow office numbers will bear glad tidings, but unless Madame Web can see something that the rest of us are missing, all I can foresee is a one-and-done bittersweet installment.