Here’s my Madame Web Review which is still playing in theaters from Sony Pictures and Columbia Pictures! The film is directed by S.J. Clarkson and stars Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor, Adam Scott, Emma Roberts and Tahar Rahim.

Here’s the trailer:

Sony’s follow up to Morbius was already chaotic at the moment it was announced. First off, nobody really wanted to see a movie about a blind old lady that can predict the future, has some vague ties to Spider-Man and really got a big chunk of popularity due to Spider-Man: The Animated Series from the 90s. It also didn’t help that the Sony-Marvel movie wanted to use the heroic supporting character Ezekiel Sims as the film’s bad guy.

So was it as bad as they say? For me, it’s bearable. Sure I’ll give it a low low low score but it’s bearable.

For this Madame Web review, we’ll subtract points for everything “sinful” about the film. We’ll start off with 10 points and let’s drop it down.

• Visuals – visuals were so dated to be honest. Evil Spider-Man looks cool but the stuntwork and the use of powers in this film is so dated. I was thinking if they were just using early 2000s visual CGI and effects or if the machines that they used to render were from that particular era.
• The Whole Story / Plot – I can see some semblance of a story here with their intended “Final Destination” approach to the movie but the finished product was a patchwork abomination. It’s very obvious that they gutted the original plot (which involves some time traveling to ensure the safety and survival of baby Peter Parker with the help of Johnson’s Cassandra Webb). But then it became a completely different animal with the evil Ezekiel Sims tracking down three teenagers who were fated to kill him. We’ll circle back to this later.
• Deadpan acting – I’m really scared for Dakota Johnson because of her deadpan acting in the film. She’s serious? Then that’s perfect, cracking an awkward joke? Definitely not. Thing is, that’s what happens throughout the film. And I’m scared because her acting and her style works in some films but for Madame Web, she could be hurting her career more than she’ll ever know.
• Lazy writing – there is a ton of moments where you can go “oh, lazy writing” whether its the fact that a wanted criminal was able to leave the United States for Peru or that the bad guys are rocking some serious Lenovo firepower with their surveillance technology but fail to see the intended targets. But the biggest “lazy writing” callout moment for me was the stolen taxi. So the taxi was stolen early on and has been used throughout the movie. It’s stated that Cassie’s become a wanted person and she stole a cab. However the cab was used as their main mode of transportation and even as a weapon against evil Spider-Man. Then later in the film. Cassandra leaves the US and comes back home by the third act still driving around the car. The same fricking car. Like nobody even bothered to check why there’s a cab with a dented hood running around NYC?
• Identity Crisis – it was marketed and branded as a superhero movie from Marvel and Sony and yet, we barely got anything with the heroines. We did get a man in a weird Spider-Man costume but that’s the villain of the story. We did get this majestic shot…

And that was for a total of 2 to 3 minutes.

I know the film kept a lot of people from the unemployment like but putting these heroes in the movie only as a teaser is just a slap in the face of moviegoers. This is by far the biggest sin for me. One that really made me drop a few notches.

• Weirdest Product Placement – I like Pepsi but what I really don’t like here is how it figures into the story.
• Other casts – The three ladies who appeared in the movie namely Isabel Merced, Sydney Sweeney and Celeste O’Connor were all under utilized and i say that with a heavy heart. These three girls are potentially great Hollywood big names in the future. For example, Isabel Merced becoming Hawkgirl for the upcoming Superman movie and she was also Dora the Explorer.  And yet the writing team couldn’t figure out how exactly they should sound and how they should act so when you see the movie very confusing thing and depressing. There was also barely any characterization or growth for these three characters and the biggest sin for this segment is that they did not even show us how they got their powers which is a real bummer.
• Missed opportunities – Madame Web could have been a better movie if they chose a specific angle like if they chose the precog angle for Cassandra Webb we could have been seeing a lot more drama and a little bit of action. Personally i would have wanted to see the three ladies develop into superheroes with Madame Web as their mom of sorts. We could have ended the movie with the three of them not really with their costumes but at least with their powers and taking on Ezekiel Sims but that did not happen.
• Discount Spider Bum – Sony decided to use a Spider-Man pastiche to be able to tell the story with a terminator style enemy for the main character. Problem is they chose Ezekiel Sims who is a fan favorite character in the Amazing Spider-Man books because he was there to help Peter Parker fight Morlun in the books. For the Madam Web movie they decided to just do an all out character assassination and turn him into this awful guy with the ADR voiceover. I cannot stress how awful and ugly the costume was for this film.

Madame Web final thoughts

If this is what Sony  wants to do with the Spider-Man franchise and the Spider-Man universe that they have under their belt then we as fans our screwed.

They obviously did not do their research or maybe they did and they had another different movie lying around in the studio somewhere but this is not the product that was promising. This was a frankenstein’s monster of epic proportions.

Still i would die on this hill and say that the film is bearable, barely bearable. And given the economy right now buying a movie ticket is also something that you need to consider thinking twice about and thus isn’t a good movie to invest your time and money on.

If this is going to be the quality of other Spider-Man related movies in the works like the upcoming Kraven movie then we should just really lower our standards to the lowest of the low.

2/5

Follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more geek news and updates!