I sat down and watched Sony’s latest car crash of a film, Madame Web.
A story about a New York City paramedic who, after seeing visions of the future assembles a team of super-powered Spider-Women to stop a deadly madman…or at least, that’s what the trailer for this film would make you believe.
This movie is a story about a woman and three teenage girls who run around NYC for two hours and try not to die, and believe me, it is not entertaining. The film also delivers on virtually none of its promises with little to no action, little to no humor, little to no redeeming qualities, and little to no enjoyment from anyone who worked on it.
First off this movie sucks to watch, and I don’t just mean that it was boring I mean that I’m upset that I paid money for this. I couldn’t begin to tell you everything wrong with Madame Web, but I’ll start somewhere.
For being an action/superhero film, there isn’t any action and there certainly isn’t any superheroing going on. To give you an idea of what I mean in the film’s three action scenes is that there are more times when a person gets hit by a car than times somebody throws a punch.
What I’m trying to say is that at the very least if you’re gonna make an action movie, show the audience some type of action other than gently speed walking away from danger, and if you’re gonna make a superhero movie, it might be nice to see somebody in a costume every now and then, rather than taking a week-long trip to Peru.
One thing this film did do a great job of is understanding that the audience was likely going to fall asleep while watching this, and so to prepare for that they made sure that every scene would be just as hard to follow as the one before it.
Frankly, I think this is pretty genius. It means that everyone will have the same shared experience of walking out of the movie theater and realizing they can’t remember a single one of the characters names, or where an entire hour and a half of this movie went, which I can tell you from personal experience.
This may be due in part to the editing which has the camera flip and zoom and generally be more distracting than anything else. It’s also because the acting is just bad and the dialogue is so hard to follow that I would believe this movie was written as a sixth grade writing project.
While we’re on the topic of acting, the controversy surrounding this movie is way more entertaining than anything that happens within its two hour runtime.
While being interviewed on her press tour for this movie, lead actress Dakota Johnson was asked questions about this film like who the villain was, and what her powers were.
Now not only could she not give an answer, but she even went so far as to state she wasn’t even going to watch Madame Web.
Furthermore, the day after the trailer dropped on Youtube, Johnson allegedly swiftly fired her agent for even landing her a role in such a terrible movie and honestly, I don’t blame her.
Beyond Johnson’s general disgust of this project, actress Sydney Sweeney was asked what her thoughts on this movie were and she stated that she was “honored to be a part of all this.”
A statement, which many considered weird but now makes sense because Sweeney later confirmed that she and the other actresses were led to believe that Madame Web was a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The same MCU which gave audiences Iron Man, Thor and The Avengers movies. However, this film bears no connection to those projects and all this movie turns out to be is a sad cash grab by Sony who want to keep making their movies about Spider-Man villains without a Spider-Man.
My final thoughts on Madame Web overall are as follows. A thin and hard to follow plot, some of the worst action I’ve ever seen put to screen and a likely career low performance for everyone who acted in it.
