Madame Web is so bad I came out of unofficial retirement for this. It’s so bad it makes me want to write movie reviews again. It’s so bad it energized my lazy self to get typing. Sony, take a bow. That’s a feat that other terrible and many great films haven’t accomplished. Not even the amazing Across the Spiderverse or hype Spider-Man: No Way Home got that. I’ve seen plenty of trash too like Black Adam or Quantumania but didn’t feel like devoting my time to it.
I’ve relaxed in my rambunctousness as I’ve aged. I don’t get as worked up about bad stuff and I just am happy to enjoy good stuff. If something sucks, I just stop caring about it and move on. When it’s good, thumbs up baby.
But holy crap, man. This movie stinks. It’s just everything I find wrong with modern movies all into one movie.
This is everything wrong with comic book movies. When people meme on these movies it feels like this is the mess they consider everything to be (not that a lot of the recent offerings from Marvel or DC have been good). This belongs with Catwoman. You know, the one that didn’t involve Gotham or Batman or anything relevant to Catwoman? Because this is Madame Web but without Spider-Man.
It would be like making a Court of Owls or Lady Arkham story but they exist in a world where Batman does not. It’s just vomiting buzzwords out of an IP that people know for cheap pops.
A big personal wrong that this movie does is bad ADR, which stands for Automated Dialogue Replacement. It is a fancy way to say a character redubbed over their lines to make them more clear or emotional or whatever to try and better match the scene. This happens for various reasons but typically because on-set audio sometimes can be a little messy and muffled. Most movies have tons of this and you don’t notice.
Bad ADR ruins scenes for me and I swear the bad guy’s almost every line is ADR’d and done so in a way where the audio level isn’t matched to the rest of the scene. I love video games but he sounds like when video game mixing is bad. The Twisted Metal show has this issue where Sweet Tooth’s lines aren’t done by the actor on set, so everything is just off by 5%.
It’s also everything wrong with Big Hollywood’s obsession with blue/green screen so you can crunch non-unionized computer graphics artists by doing everything in post production instead of paying unionized set designers and cinematographers and prop makers and extras and so on. Does 80+ million dollars just get you nothing these days?
It bothers me in the same way that the Star Wars prequels are full of stilted performances. The characters physicality doesn’t match what is happening around them because they act first based off imagination or ideas from the director but then whichever graphics artist fills the scene in is working off a different idea or direction months later. The performance isn’t cohesive with the environment.
So I don’t even know how to rate the performances. Yes, there are many awkward line reads and reactions or non-reactions and parts where someone is pretending to touch stuff that clearly isn’t there and it looks awkward AF. But because it was such a blue screen obsessed production it’s weird to call it acting in any serious sense when the actresses self admittedly were acting off of nothing.
Ian McKellan is a phenomenal actor and he even struggled on The Hobbit movies working off nothing in many scenes. Blue/green screen overreliance made Gandalf cry on set!
Actors and actresses are talented people and a big part of their job is that physicality and interaction with each other and the set and selling the little things but those are lost when the most they often have are a couple of dots on a blue dummy in an empty sound stage.
There is just nothing here which sucks because I do think these actors have better in them. I haven’t seen much with Dakota Johnson but people seem to like her. Sydney Sweeney was great in Euphoria and the only other work I’ve seen was Anyone But You which I thought was a perfectly good romcom. I really liked Emma Roberts in Holidate. A bunch of the rest of the cast has faces I feel like I’ve seen elsewhere like Mike Epps, who I looked up and realized I must have seen him in Dolomite Is My Name. Good movie!
I guess the presentation of the bad guy is pretty neat. But I’m a decently dork pilled comic book loser and I have no clue who he is. I’ve watched my share of cartoons and read some volumes here and there. No clue who this Ezekial Sims guy is. I legitimately believe I have never seen him in anything Spider-Man before. But the suit is pretty neat? And he isn’t talking with his bad ADR most of the time in the suit. Big win.
What’s really wild is that Sony knows how to not suck at Spider-man related media. Across The Spiderverse is one of the best movies I’ve seen in years and it’s in my 2023 holy trinity with Barbie and Oppenheimer. That’s a movie filled with art and care and fantastic performances so much so that it can be overwhelming in how much style is flashing on the screen.
I’m a big fan of all three Spider-Man games for the PS4 and PS5. I think those are made well with care by people who know the characters and are motivated to tell good stories. I bought a PS4 for Spider-Man and I bought my PS5 for Spider-Man 2. Fantastic stories and games.
I even like the Venom movies! I think the first one is fun in a dumb charming way because Ed Hardy is doing such a good job. I thought for a PG13 movie they did a really good job with Carnage in the second film. But this movie nor Morbius (and unlikely that Kraven bucks the trend) have that weird charm that makes you sit through the crap to get back to the good stuff.
And that’s probably the core issue. Venom has enough material and presence as a character to be his own guy. You can figure out a Venom story with ideas without Spider-Man and it’ll be okay Frankenstiening bits together. Madame Web’s whole thing is Spider-Man’s fate is her weaving or whatever and Spider Totems and nonsense. But there is no Spider-Man in these Sony offshoot films.
Just… holy crap, man. This movie stinks. It’s just everything wrong with the stuff I dislike all into one movie. For my gamers, this is the Ride To Hell: Retribution of movies. I haven’t been so disappointed with a movie in ages. I think it might be Transformers 5: The Last Knight and that movie is a special kind of terrible.
Even when these super hero movies are bad, they’re still up my alley enough that I can enjoy them in some way. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and The Flash are nothing to write home about, but only 70% trash and I can be satisified enough with the 30% I liked to come away pleased.
So why did I go see it? I had a free movie voucher and no weekend plans. Did I go into it expecting bad and pre-hating? No, I was hoping for bad-good which are some of my favourite movies. Who doesn’t rubberneck at a car crash?
But this is one you can easily look away from.
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