Ladies & gentlemen, they & them,
Early 2000’s superhero movies are back, baby!
Madame Web is a top-tier dumpster fire.
It has some of the worst dialogue I have heard in a while. How are these writers, who brought us such gems as Dracula Untold, The Last Witch Hunter, Gods of Egypt, and the trillion-dollar hit Morbius, still working?
“Every day that goes by, my appointment with death gets closer.” is an actual line from the movie. There is plenty more to go around.
The editing and visual effects are atrocious.
The acting from everyone is awful. The line delivery is shockingly low energy, and I did not believe a word any of the actors were saying.
I have seen these actors do great work in the past, so this is 100% the director's fault here. It's crazy how a director can get piss-poor performances from good actors.
The characters had no chemistry with each other. The scenes together felt so awkward and unnatural.
There are so many character choices that don't make sense.
The villain fucking sucks. There is no real character to him. He's just a boring evil guy who wants to kill three “teenagers” because he dreamed of them killing him in the future. He is not threatening at all.
I noticed the actor who played the villain was dubbed over with ADR for most of his scenes. You can tell.
None of the humour landed. Painfully unfunny.
The 2003 pop culture references were a pathetic excuse for creating a time capsule setting.
Adam Scott and Emma Roberts have nothing to do here. You wonder why they are even there.
For a superhero movie, there are barely any exciting action scenes. Whenever there is some action, it's nothing special. I would not mind the lack of action if the story, characters, and acting were superb, but it has none of that.
The fact that the final battle scene takes place underneath a Cola/Pepsi sign is another example of the terrible product placement from Sony.
The final shot is the most embarrassing thing I have ever seen.
My jaw is on the floor of how a movie like this can be shit out by a big studio. Sony REALLY needs to cut it out with these unnecessary Spider-Man spin-off films.
Madame Web is the worst superhero movie ever made. Yes, I mean it. At least the other bad superhero movies had some redeeming qualities to it. But this movie has nothing. Everything about this movie is wrong. Fant4stic is better than this. It makes Morbius look competently made.
The current state of superhero movies is in trouble, and Madame Web is not helping.
Ouch, that average rating! I'm not going to lie though, I genuinely had a fun time watching 'Madame Web'... perhaps I should be keeping that fact quiet?
I don't know what to say, I found it to be suitably entertaining. I'm sure there are plot holes aplenty (I noticed a few) and it probably makes zero sense/isn't a good adaptation compared to its source material or whatever but honesty... I don't care, it gave me enough enjoyment that I wasn't questioning anything about what I was watching.
The cast are probably the key factors as to why I did enjoy this. I previously knew of Dakota Johnson but hadn't actually seen her in anything properly, I found her performance to be more than noteworthy and she spearheads the film strongly. The trio of Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O'Connor are positives too.
Tahar Rahim's antagonist, meanwhile, is poorly written and portrayed, though I personally thought the actor did a good job. I have no complaints with anyone who appears onscreen to be honest. Away from them, the pacing and score are also standouts.
In my recollection of viewing this, I truthfully haven't got any issues with it. If it wasn't for the slight bad murmurs that I did hear about pre-watch (though not much of it as I avoid as much as I can with movies) and the reaction on sites like this post-watch, I'd not be questioning my thoughts about this whatsoever.
As I always say, to each their own. For me, gimme a sequel (as long as the cast remain, mind). Not even sorry.
This movie is insane and terrible and I think I need to watch it every day. I was laughing from the very first second. The fist indicator that this film was being phoned in by literally everybody was when the opening titles was just white text on a black screen. No one bothered to make even a 5 second opening title sequence. It's then immediately followed by an opening scene with some of the clunkiest dialogue I've ever heard, combined with the most laughable zooms in the editing. It's truly a bizarre thing to see.
Dakota Johnson is giving an absolute max of 80% at any given moment, and has a few line deliveries that had me dying laughing, both intentionally and unintentionally. Everything to do with the villain and his assistant from Girls is pure insanity, from "de-aging" the girls 10 years by simply removing their masks in the picture, to all the ADR, it's all confounding. Adam Scott is certainly there, saying his lines, along with Emma Roberts. Neither of them have much of an impact on the story except to tangentially connect Cassie to an infant, alternate universe version of a character we already know, but they sure are there and saying things.
TL:DR This movie makes every wrong choice and I want to spend the rest of my life trying to understand it
This had a fine cast, albeit a bit old to be playing 16-year-olds, but the script and direction were not good. I found Dakota Johnson's character to be really unlikeable for most of the film, and there was no look into the three members of her cohort, which seemed like a really wasted opportunity. What was the plan, to tell their backstory in a sequel? Tahar Rahim is a fine actor, but he was not good in this, and for all the vitriol against this film, it wasn't that bad, but it also wasn't good, as it really wasn't a superhero film, so I'm not really certain why they marketed it as such. To give you an idea of how bad the scripting/dialogue was, there was a scene in the first third of the film, where the four main characters are standing in a park getting to know one another a bit. Celeste O'Connor complains that her father makes a fortune polluting the oceans with plastics, which would've been a worthy gripe had she not less than 30 seconds earlier finished eating a bag of beef jerky before tossing the empty plastic bag into the bushes. Seriously, no one in the entire filmmaking process caught this?
It’s genuinely a terrible movie but its an enjoyable experience because you are laughing at how bad the writing is and the delivery is and in general how the cgi looks, or at least my friends & I were laughing throughout.
I’ve never seen 50 shades of grey so I don’t know if Dakota can do any better than this but jesus christ it genuinely just feels like Dakota Johnson was playing Dakota Johnson.
Adam Scott as Ben (PARKER! as they name dropped with 3 minutes left of the movie) was definitely the best one there and you could tell he was doing his best with the script given to him, I’m slightly biased because of his performances in both Parks and Recreation (my favorite sitcom since I was 10) and Severance (Phenomenal) but he was definitely the easiest to watch.
Emma Roberts showing up in this movie halfway through was a shock and she gave the performance she usually does (not great). And then all of a sudden she gives birth to Peter Parker ? Don’t exactly understand why the tie in happened but to be fair I don’t understand why most of this happened.
overall a terribly bad movie. I want to give it a 2-3 because of how hard I laughed but I do have to give it a 1. Though I almost want a sequel to this because of how bad it was, but Dakota will never try this again.
Madam Web movie swings into theaters with all the grace of a clumsy Spider-Man wannabe. From the very first scene, it's like watching a spider trying to swing from a broken web - awkward and cringeworthy. The plot is as tangled as a web spun by a spider on caffeine, leaving viewers more confused than J. Jonah Jameson trying to understand Peter Parker's double life. The dialogue is as forced as a supervillain team-up, making even the most die-hard Spider-Man fans cringe in their seats.
If you're thinking of watching Madam Web, my advice is to run faster than the Flash on a caffeine rush in the opposite direction. Save yourself from the agony of witnessing a superhero movie gone terribly wrong. The only "amazing" thing about this movie is how it manages to disappoint on every possible level. It's like Venom without the cool factor, or a Spider-Man movie without the friendly neighborhood charm.
In conclusion, Madam Web is a cinematic disaster of epic proportions, making even Spider-Man's most notorious foes look like misunderstood heroes. Do yourself a favor and spend your time and money on something more enjoyable, like rewatching Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man movies for the hundredth time. Madam Web is a web you definitely want to avoid getting caught in - unless you enjoy feeling like you've been bitten by a radioactive disappointment spider.
I kind of expected that 'Madame Web' wouldn't be a good movie. That's why the main question for me was whether it was better or worse than 'Morbius'. In the end, I can say that it's maybe slightly better, but still not even remotely worth seeing.
Lead actress Dakota Johnson isn't the problem, though, even if she doesn't necessarily appear as if she enjoyed being on set. On the other hand, Tahar Rahim is a disaster as the villain, Ezekiel Sims. He delivers one of the worst performances I've ever seen in a superhero movie. Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O'Connor, and Isabela Merced, meanwhile, are not worth mentioning as future Spider-People. Each of them is assigned exactly one character trait; they end up being nothing more than that.
A big problem with the movie is that you spend about two hours wondering when it's finally gonna kick into gear - and then it just ends. Occasionally, something is teased that could come in a later movie and would certainly be much more worth seeing. So 'Madame Web' works more or less like an overlong post-credit scene. In the sense that the only purpose of the movie is to foreshadow a more interesting movie that will surely never come.
I kind of feel sorry for Marvel Studios. They're only releasing one movie this year to address superhero fatigue, and then Sony swoops in. I'm sure there are still a lot of moviegoers who don't understand the difference between the MCU and Sony-Marvel. And then this movie is intentionally designed to somehow fit in with the Tom Holland movies. That's definitely going to cause some people to draw the wrong conclusions.
To sum up, I can only describe 'Madame Web' with one word, and that is Pepsi (in fact, with the aggressive product placement, you can kind of draw a parallel between MCU/Sony and Coca-Cola/Pepsi).
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.
Review by Sam WightVIP 2BlockedParent2024-03-12T05:51:53Z
This is the most amazing movie I have ever seen. This is art. This movie will become minimum 10% of my personality from today until the day I die. I walked out of the movie theater a changed man. Some of my favorite moments from the movie:
Dakota Johnson starts off the movie by stealing a taxi. Nobody questions this. She spends the entire movie driving this stolen taxi. She removes the license plates from the taxi to apparently make it more inconspicuous (???). She crashes the taxi into a diner, completely ruining it. She still drives the taxi. No character questions this at all. This has become her car. She then randomly decides to go to PERU (????). She drives the taxi to the airport. Then she drives back home in the taxi. This implies that she parks the stolen taxi, which is beat up, busted, and has no license plates, at the airport for at least a week with nobody asking questions.
Dakota Johnson's sole superpower in this movie is vehicular manslaughter. I am not kidding. The main way she deals with the bad guy is by crashing a big vehicle into him unexpectedly. Not once, but twice in the movie. Also, this bad guy can see the future. And it still happens. Incredible.
This movie is sponsored by Pepsi. Dakota Johnson spends five minutes of the movie trying (and failing) to open the most blue, unblemished can of Pepsi I have ever seen in my life. Five minutes she is just holding this thing, rubbing it, stroking it like a genie, pulling the tab, tapping it. She never opens it.
Also, the villain is defeated when the gigantic neon letter P from the logo on the exploding Pepsi-Co factory falls on him and squishes him to death.
There is not a single line in this movie spoken by the villain that was not ADRed. It's fantastic. He sounds exactly like Tommy Wiseau.
During a dramatic flashback in the movie, we watch Dakota Johnson's mother find out that her child was going to have a disability. But in case any of the viewers are too dull to interpret the literal dialogue that she is saying correctly, Dakota Johnson is providing CONSTANT dialogue in addition to this explaining to the dull viewers exactly what's going on. "But I don't have muscular distrophy..." "So THAT'S why you went to find the spiders." And my personal favorite, "You did it..." The way Dakota Johnson says "You did it" is seared into my brain and will be forever how I say those words from now on. They are just too fucking funny.
Dakota Johnson uses the taxi from earlier to kidnap a bunch of teenagers and decides to leave them in the forest for hours. The teenagers literally say "Maybe you shouldn't be leaving us in a forest like this?" and Dakota is just like "No stay right there, byeeee" and then goes back to NYC in the stolen taxi and cries with her cat about her mom and spiders. Then she gets mad when the teenagers go to a diner to get food because she also left them in the forest without anything to eat and without any way to contact her. In fact the moment a teenager mentioned a cell phone, she immediately threw the cell phone out the window without asking any questions.
This movie is OBSESSED with letting you know that it takes place in the 2000s. Britney Spears' 'Toxic' plays on the radio and the DJ is like "This song is going to be a HUGE hit!" Dakota parks her stolen taxi in front of a Dangerously In Love billboard. Dakota spends 120 seconds anxiously listening to a voicemail message on her ancient home phone to progress the plot.
Dakota Johnson falls into the river and gets hit in the eye with a firecracker (exploding Pepsi factory) and is blinded after she defeats the villain. The girls she's taking care of have to pull her out of the river and perform CPR on her. This exact sequence of events (minus the blinding) happens earlier in the movie.
Dakota Johnson then goes to the hospital. Nurse asks "Oh, is everyone here family?" Dakota Johnson says (with the sappiest smile ever, and with a ridiculous bandage covering her eyes) "Yes, they're mine" and "I have everything I need right here" (blegh)
Then the last five minutes of this movie are the most hilarious five minutes I've ever seen in cinema ever. Everyone in the theater was cackling. I was almost crying from laughter.
Dakota Johnson has the fugliest and most ridiculous pair of sunglasses I have ever seen in my life. There is also this ugly fucking SPIDERWEB WINDOW that apparently got added to her apartment that it is never explained how it got there. Also, SHE IS IN A WHEELCHAIR!!!! Girl is just blind!!!!!! WHY IS SHE IN A WHEELCHAIR????
Well the girls she's watching get back home. Then she does the slowest, funniest, most dramatic and comedic turn around in the wheelchair to face them I have ever seen. And the sunglasses just make it so much worse. By her smile alone you can tell she is finished with this movie and wants her paycheck so she can get the fuck out. Hilarious.
Absolutely the most incredible thing I have ever seen.