Madame Web gets tangled in itself

Madame Web (2024)

I don’t want to get your hopes up.  Madame Web is a bad movie.  It does a lot wrong.  In fact, it does almost everything wrong.  But no matter how many mistakes I noticed; I couldn’t bring myself to hate it.  The audio was terrible, with actors clearly not physically saying what was playing through the speakers.  The levelling was brutal, with some scenes being unnecessarily loud or frustratingly quiet.  The script had the complexity of a third-grade book report.  There is an old saying with regards to TV and movie writing: “Show, don’t tell”.  The writers of Madame Web apparently never heard that.  Every new power that Cassandra Web gains is explicitly explained as soon as she discovers it, as if the audience can’t put together that she experiences something twice and can change things on the second time through.  A child who hasn’t mastered object permanence could follow this movie.  Anyone more advanced than that will either be frustrated or find humor in the near constant plot-holes that litter the landscape of this movie.  This movie isn’t without its strengths, though.  The female cast is strong and adequately portray the flat characters they are given.  Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O’Connor deserved better, showing flashes of charm and fun in a movie otherwise bereft of emotion.  Adam Scott is the only other bright spot, playing Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben as a young EMT before he gets murdered in a canon event.  But the villain was atrocious.  His audio dubbing was always out of sync and when he had something to say, it was absolutely ridiculous.  His entire arc was essentially “I’m angry because I had a bad upbringing so I want power” to “I’m angry because I have power and I might lose it”.  But somehow, with all of these problems, it was not worse than Morbius.  I did not like Madame Web, but I did not hate it.  I will forget just about everything from this movie in a few days.  Overall, it’s bad and I give Madame Web 1 out of 8 legs on a spider.