13% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 215 reviews)
Runtime: 116 minutes
Directed by: S.J. Clarkson
Starring: Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabella Merced, Celeste O’Connor, Tahar Rahim
From: Columbia/Marvel
Did Sony create a patch for this movie? Before I get into why I saw the first movie disaster of 2024, the reviews I came across noted the villain delivering an explanation for his being evil… which wasn’t present in the movie. The villain has been said by everyone to have “much” of his dialogue obviously ADR’ed, which wasn’t seen by me either… but it certainly looked like his mouth was CG’ed to fix the problem! Please, no one go the cinema again to confirm or deny this theory. It didn’t look like anything else was changed—there is still numerous instances of cameras not focusing on the speaking character, lousy CG, acres of bad dialogue, how illogical the plot is, etc.
Yeah, this may be a lengthier review than typical. I only believe that the movie may be patched as if it was a typical videogame of the past few generations because it famously happened w/ Cats because it first came out w/ what looked like unfinished effects.
Normally I don’t attend the cinema to watch pictures deemed the worst of the year; however, the discourse surrounding Madame Web has been SO hilarious and several detailed reviews on YouTube have been watched… it was compelling to use AMC A-List to see the picture. It was amusing for me to check it out in an IMAX auditorium in an Orlando suburb w/ new seats and IMAX-12 sound.
Goodness gracious, the discourse just from people flipping out over Chris Stuckmann’s non-review of the movie where he dumped on Sony for allegedly ruining their comic book movies…. I don’t watch his reviews anyhow, whether it be his current “safe” mode or his prior outrageous persona full of way too many F-bombs. Truthfully, Letterboxd reviews more determine what I do and don’t see. His arguments are full of logical fallacies, to be honest. Then again, the ones in Madame Web are notably worse. Sony deserves part of the blame for how this movie turn out—so do the filmmakers. Were they inexperienced and in way over their head? It has became a meme how two of the screenwriters have failed upwards by writing such “classics” as Dracula Untold & Gods of Egypt. Director S.J. Clarkson was also another writer & credited as an executive producer, which doesn’t help Stuckmann’s argument.
I’ve known for many years how hard filmmaking is and there are a myriad of reasons why something could go wrong and a motion picture can turn out mediocre or worse. As of now, who knows why Madame Web turned out so poorly; many share blame, I am sure. Those who chose to bring this to screen is one, along with the director S.J. Clarkson. Then again, allegedly the original script was quite a bit different and Ezekiel Sims was going after the unborn Peter Parker; who knows why the changes occur.
Madame Web was a character unfamiliar to me whatsoever; whether or not it was “canon” to the comic books mattered none to me. This being an origin story didn’t help as those are played out now; even if it HAD to be one involving Cassandra Web and multiple Spider-Women, it should have been legitimately entertaining rather than a flop that me and many others howl in laughter at.
I’ll mention the main flaws, either for the first or second time: bad story, poor characters, inconsistent superpowers, acres of bad, stilted, unnatural dialogue, logical fallacies, them dancing around that this is a universe where Peter Parker is about to be born without mentioning he was Peter Parker, blatant Pepsi product placement, and many other problems. I do have some compliments to give: some effects were done in camera w/ the diopter, there is increased motivation to check out the GOOD projects the young talent has been involved with, the period songs were at least nice to hear (hopefully you won’t get Toxic stuck in your head; it’s easy to) and the score from Johan Soderqvist wasn’t bad… learning he scored Let the Right One In raised my eyebrows.
Overall, despite my incredibly low score I did not loathe the experience or thought it was as painful as a root canal like the Exorcist or Expendables sequels were. There are the caveats of my ambivalence towards the genre and my knowledge of the entire plot beforehand due to the reviews that got into the granular detail of the whole spectacle… the fact that the star of the movie made her dissatisfaction blatant and probably won’t ever see the end result only adds to the hilarity. At least this had the temerity to fail in such spectacular fashion.
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