By Santiago Brion | February 26, 2024
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Madame Web is the newest movie in Sony’s Marvel franchise. The Sony Marvel Universe of Spider-Man Characters started with Venom and three movies, including Madame Web, have come out so far. The film follows Cassandra (Cassie) Webb, a New York City paramedic who starts to show signs of clairvoyance. She must protect three young teenagers from a mysterious adversary who is connected to Cassie’s mother, while also forced to confront her past. In the future of this movie, the three women that Cassie has to protect are three Spider-Women: Anya, Julia and Mattie.
While it does have the opportunity to explore the Spider-Man mythos in live action, the film fails to keep the audience engaged in what’s happening in the movie. “Madame Web” has a series of crash zooms that’ll make you dizzy and give you a headache. The special effects and cinematography are extremely bland compared to inventive and creative comic book movies. The movie gives off “Oh god, I haven’t done the assignment.” Spider-Man references are inserted in a movie that have zero identity or purpose to exist.
The performances from Dakota Johnson, Adam Scott, Sydney Sweeney, Isabel Merced and Celeste O’Connor are one-dimensional and boring. Johnson specifically tries very hard and you can tell that the actors couldn’t believe the utter garbage that they were saying that it’s almost laughable.
The villain of this movie, Ezekiel, played by Tahar Rahim, is a forgettable villain with lame motivation for his actions. Basically, he killed Cassie’s mother when she was pregnant and the Spider-People of the amazon rescued Baby Cassie. Ezekiel saw in a vision that the three girls that Cassie’s protecting killed him for a forgettable reason and he says throughout the movie that these women are going to destroy him. Which shamefully has the movie give off an anti-feminist agenda. It’s a distasteful way of telling a female led superhero movie by being mean-spirited and giving the wrong type of message of female empowerment.
Add in the unnecessary B-plot of Mary Parker (Peter Parker/Spider-Man’s mother) being in the final term of her pregnancy and Uncle Ben (Adam Scott) just being there for Spider-Man plot reasons and you have a theatrically released movie that’s ashamed of its own existence, and is meant to exist just because Sony wants to put out a movie related to Spider-Man every year or so.
It’s not so bad it’s good like the Venom movies, and it’s not meme-worthy and stupid fun like Morbius, Madame Web is simply just bad.
0/10
You can watch this movie at Regal Crossgates or Regal Colonie Center.