Madame Web: it was a movie

 When you accept responsibility, great power will come.

I don't often find myself stepping outside the realms of the game's industry when it comes to this blog, but when I do it tends to be for a damned good reason. For the times when there is a topic of such seismic significance that the way we live our lives could very well be changed. One such turning point dawned upon me the moment I watched the Madame Web movie and transcended from my being. We all knew we were looking at something special when we saw the trailer, but it was only upon being in the theatre, cramped in shoulder to shoulder with the other six participants, that I truly looked upon the bare face of god on high and knew in that one brilliant, shattering moment, that he must have abandoned us to let something like this happen. I don't know if he's ever coming back from getting those smokes, but 'Madame Web' would imply not.

Sony's latest attempt to capitalise off the hard work that Disney put in making the Marvel brand profitable, Madame Web feels like the final stop on a long trip to disregard every single lesson that modern superhero filmmaking has learnt across the past two decades. Watching this movie transported me back to my childhood where all cinema was just loud noise and all I wanted to do was curl up into a ball and watch my cartoons- worlds where things made sense. And yeah, I pretty much wish I went for a cheeky Rugrats binge rather than attend that screening. (Would have been a hell of a lot cheaper too!) But before I get into it there is an elephant that needs addressing. I need to make it absolutely clear that no- there is not a single piece of merit worth praising about this movie, and that alone is what makes it so incredible. Just so we're on the same page here.

Madame Web tells us the origin story of a Spider-Man side character in a way that attempts to frame it as a mystery thriller movie, which I suspect might have been the original concept when they signed everyone's name to the project. That potential exists only in concept today, however, because the bogging down of references to the Spider-Man mythos, a horrendously bad Spider-Suit for the villain, dull setpieces and the over-arching aura of the one true god-king Pepsi standing over the entire production- Web feels like an aggressive waste of time in it's every scene. Kudos for the team for managing to depict a 'reliving the same moment' story in the most bare basic way possible- by replaying footage again and again and pretending that is anyway trippy even by the fifteenth time we've seen it. But these are the higher conceptuals of the filmmaking process I'm critiquing, and let me be clear that the problems do not start there.

Right from the very first scene, itself a redundant flashback of setting that is already going to be explained later on in the movie, every character is speaking in pure exposition mode. Not an ounce of character or situational context survived to the page, these actors might as well have been AI chatbots reading out the Wikipedia summary of the Madame Web movie page. And one of them very well might have been for the way that Ezekiel Sims botches every spoken word in the entire film. He is the villain, by the way, so we get to hear a lot of his ear screeching terribleness. Now the man is clearly not a native English speaker, but that doesn't explain why every line he speaks, even lines spoken in scenes with a clearly visible mouth, are terribly and nearly incoherently voiced over in a faux-gruff tone that sounds like the sort of voice you grumble over Xbox live at 12 o'clock at night when you don't want you parents to here you trash talking. (Having English be your second language and being actually incapable of acting in English are two vastly different degrees of language competency!)

Dakota Johnson's Cassie Webb is perhaps the most inline with the vibe of the film in that she is prickly and as uncooperative as the script will allow her to be, which seems to match the vibe the actress had accepting this role given her general disinterest regarding the role during all of her press tours. There's a mean spiritedness about the character that I found relatable, if not really in line with the role she is supposed to coming into as the 'mentor' of the attacked children, and were this a better film I might critique her performance as a detriment to the film. As it sits her casual snark almost comes across as a knowing wink to the audience that she is aware just how trash this all is and is equally as annoyed about being here. She was the one island in this production that seemed self aware.

Her co-stars on the other hand? They were just fine. Various Spider-themed side characters from across the canon that had not yet been swooped up by either Spider-Verse or Insomniac. The movie treats them like the rejects it sees them as, affixing surfaces level character traits and familiar names to high school teenagers in the hopes that the complex narratives that comic authors have spent decades crafting will just magically ooze in them making the cast inexplicably 'interesting'. It is a vain hope. The cast really don't deserve to be in this movie and moreover don't deserve to steal the name of genuine comic book characters. And the unambitious nature of the movie means they don't even get to dress up like them in anything other than desperate flash forward dream sequences in an attempt to secure a franchise that will never come.

To it's slight credit however, I will admit that Madame Web does save it's most memorably unhinged lunacy for the final act. From some of the most moronic leaps of logic imaginable, such as leading Sims into a fireworks factory and setting off the payload so that one of the fireworks can fire at a solid brick wall- totally destroying it in order to open up an escape. Oh, and then there's the firework that blows up a helicopter. And we couldn't forget the editing nightmares such as the dramatic zoom in on Webb's glacial comebacks, or the way that a giant 'S' from a Pepsi sign is what saves the day by squashing Ezekiel underneath it's holy girth. Truly we are blessed by the carbonated gods to witness such a sight. And little can match the incredible back-door CW-level series pitch the show tried to make in it's epilogue portion, shipping these aspiring actresses as low-level cosplay superheroes for the rest of their natural careers. Thank god this bombed, saving them from the kinds of contracts that career's never survive!

If 2023 was the year that Superhero movies died, then 2024 was the year that their corpse was defiled in such a blasphemous way to bury any and all hope of resuscitation. I genuinely believe that out of all the hands that went into making that film from production to script writing to cinematography to set design to costume design to acting and to even the casting director- everything was a failure. With the exception of one half decent wide shot of Webb crossing the street once. Land this one at the door of 'evil producers' all you want, the truth of the matter is that at no point has any producer sat down and said "Hey, can we make the movie as bad as we can possible make it?" Something should have gone right, by accident- but aside from the fact that the reel rolled and the film played- Madame Web is a step-by-step showcase of the worst creative efforts that the mainstream film industry has to offer. Maybe this crew would do better working in the adult film circuit- that certainly seems more their speed.