Madame Web

Sometimes when a film gets bad enough ratings, I'm morbidly interested in seeing if I can answer: "Damn, is it really that awful?". Why I did this with Madame Web, particularly when I'm busy with work, releasing my newest novel, etc. is a question for another day, but when it came to Netflix and I could watch it in 30-45 minute increments here and there, I thought, "why not?"

This review will be a [very] rapid one because the outlook is simple and I don't have much to add to the conversation. Madame Web is a bad movie and bad superhero movie. I've seen worse (one last year comes to mind) and Madame Web's worst transgression is perhaps just how weird it is. Its screenplay feels like it is stuck in a weird late 90s/early 00s era at some moments - girls dancing on the diner table to Britney Spears, for example - while the entire thing just feels like it doesn't care. Its plot consistently feels like it's stalling to make a full length film, while the characters themselves all have, say it with me, weird energy. 

The cast should be stellar (mostly), but Dakota Johnson is stuck in an odd place of caring in certain scenes and sleepwalking through others. She doesn't have the charisma to carry a lead superhero role and the script definitely doesn't help her. Nor does it help any other actresses, even "it girl" Sydney Sweeney who is positively dreadful here, with her lines consistently feeling like an audition read. Worse than all of them is the villain whose name I don't even know. His motivations are clear, but boy oh boy...he's about as powerless as a wet waffle and almost comically gets trolled by the girls he's pursuing at every turn. There's never any explanation for why he's dressed almost identical to Spider-Man and the actor is perhaps the worst of the bunch (again, to all their credit, the script doesn't give them much). 

But for some reason, I didn't outright hate Madame Web. There's nothing good or great about it, but outside of the perpetual weird energy it carries, the rest of it is just average. "I've seen worse" isn't high praise, but it's true in this sense and not all that dissimilar from the previous Sony-verse forget-me-film, Morbius. There's a bigger question here about "Where the holy hell is Sony going with all of this outside of Venom?", but for the time being, these phoned-in "origins" continue to be bafflingly dull, forgettable, and in the case of Web, very lifeless. Shocking for a studio that's also responsible for something like Across the Spider-Verse...

Rapid Rath's Review Score | 4/10