Update: February 14, 2024
Dragonlord’s Review of MADAME WEB (No Spoilers)
Bottom Line: Boasting one of the worst acting, dialogue and storytelling in modern comic book history, Sony’s Madame Web is so atrocious that it makes Morbius semi-passable in comparison.
Madame Web is the latest pathetic attempt from Sony Pictures to create their own Spider-Man cinematic universe by using Spidey’s supporting characters and villains and giving them their own solo live-action feature films.
Sony got lucky with the first
Venom movie which was a surprise hit because that was released in 2018 where the quality of superhero films were at an all-time high and the public was clamoring for comic book movie content. But
Venom’s success just sent the wrong message to Sony as the studio was encouraged to implement their expansion plans. Sony’s next two projects –
Venom: Let There Be Carnage and
Morbius – were absolute garbage and
Madame Web might be their worst effort yet.
From the initial announcement of a
Madame Web movie, people were laughing at Sony for scraping the bottom of the barrel. To make matters worse, Sony didn’t even bother to give the project a fighting chance as they hired the same writers who were responsible for stinkers like
Morbius,
Power Rangers,
The Last Witch Hunter and
Gods of Egypt. The opening of
Madame Web even feels almost identical to the opening of
Morbius with a prologue showing key characters trying to capture some animal.
In
Madame Web, Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson) is a paramedic who discovers she has precognition powers. She saves three young women from being killed by a deadly killer who is hellbent on murdering them. Constantly being hunted by the killer, Cassandra has to keep the girls safe and figure out her connection to the killer before it’s too late for all of them.
It’s an interesting premise which is a cross between
The Terminator and
Final Destination but just terribly executed. The film has a clunky vibe to it like you are watching a superhero movie made from the 1990s. But the biggest blunder is casting Dakota Johnson as the lead. Her acting is so wooden and her line delivery is so flat. You couple that with some of the worst dialogue in cinema and you get some major cringey moments, especially her embarrassing monologue at the very end. The silly pose and her superhero costume just looks so laughably bad. From telepathically communicating in her dream, seeing the past and interacting with people or being physically everywhere all at once, Cassandra's powers are so inconsistent and all over the place, like they just made up stuff to move the plot along.
Tahar Rahim plays the villain Ezekiel Sims, who wants to murder the three girls because he has been plagued by visions for years that the three girls will eventually gain powers and kill him. The villain is so uninteresting and boring that I wished they would have cast Matt Smith again and let him go nuts with it to at least keep it entertaining. It’s also a dumb move by Sony to let Ezekiel dress up similarly to Spider-Man as it somewhat tarnishes the hero’s image. It’s equally stupid to introduce an Amazonian tribe with Spider-Man-like powers.
The three girls (played by Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor) are good eye candy but they’re so bland and forgettable that you just don’t care about these characters. They show glimpses of the future where they’re supposed to become female versions of Spider-Man but you just feel empty and don’t care at all. And that is a critical failure on the movie since we just feel nothing for these characters whether they live or die. Actually, you kinda want them to die after they make stupid decisions one after the next.
Sony so badly wants to tie this movie to Peter Parker that they’ve included a young Ben Parker (Peter’s Uncle and played by Adam Scott) and Mary Parker (Peter’s mom played by Emma Roberts) but the film is just so awful that it cheapens Peter’s history a little. They even painfully and shamelessly scrambled the iconic line of "With great power, comes great responsibility" and came up with the comical, "When you take on the responsibility, great power will come."
There were initial reports that the story was supposed to be a pregnant Mary Parker being hunted by Ezekiel and objectively speaking that would have been a better angle because we know how important Peter Parker would become in the future. It gives the movie better stakes. It’s like
The Terminator where Sarah Connor would give birth to a son that would lead the humans against the machines. But what we ended up with
Madame Web is a lame story about three unknown girls becoming superheroines that looked straight out of a CW show.
There is no end-credits scene which is a huge relief since Sony has a knack of creating the dumbest, most confusing stingers in the past (see
Morbius) in order to force a connection to the real Spider-Man.
PRELIMINARY RATING: 2/10
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