Madame Web, the standalone comic book movie about a clairvoyant paramedic saving the lives of three teenage girls. The movie comes from Sony, who are the producers of the original Spider-Man trilogy starring Tobey Maguire and movies like Venom and Morbius this is like a subsection of the comic books that Sony owns and can make movies on, it is not really affiliated with the MCU, that’s owned by Disney.
The story in Madame Web doesn’t flow all that well and doesn’t really make much sense so I’m going to do my best to give you a synopsis, it’s 2003 and Cassandra Web, played by Dakota Johnson, is a paramedic working with Adam Scott’s character when she starts having visions of the future very much like Raven Simone.
These visions eventually show her three teenaged girls Sydney Sweeney’s is Julia Cornwall, Isabella Merced’s is Anya Corazon, and Celeste O’Connor is Maddie Franklin who even though they don’t know each other, are all connected somehow. Cassandra then sees a vision of Ezekiel Sims played by Tahar Rahim, a bad guy with spider powers, who has visions of these girls defeating him one day, so he wants to hunt them down and from then Cassandra and the girls go on a run. That’s the story. It’s every messy but if I had to say one positive thing about this movie is that the premise is pretty interesting having one character experience final destination visions over and over again and try to do what she can to stop them, but the movie doesn’t just squander this potential for a cool film it spits right in its face.
The writing in the movie is just terrible Sony made a horrible mistake using the writers from Morbius for this film. They tried to do “with great power comes great responsibility” line but they completely butcher it to the point where it makes no sense. Not only is there no real point to the story outside of keeping the girls alive and Cassandra learning about her mother’s past but Cassandra is an actively unlikeable character who shows absolutely no respect or patience to anybody in the film and is very antisocial in a very over the top way. And as for everybody else in the cast they might as well have been an afterthought because that’s 100% how it felt to me, we learn nothing about the three teenage girls besides a single throwaway line from each about what their home lives look like and for the most part I felt like they were just there to look confused or scared and to chase Dakota Johnson around the screen and scream. In the trailer it looked like we were going to get some good actions scenes seeing all of them in their spider outfits. Well you’ll be waiting the whole movie to see them get their spider powers and seeing them fight the main villain because it never comes. All we get is two brief sequences that are actually visions showing them all superhero up and fighting the bad guy. It has zero impact on the plot and no payoff. The one thing that bothered me most in Madame Web would have to be the editing. There are several moments where the editing just stands out as a big problem. The films villain Ezekiel had most of his line dubbed over in post-production there are scenes in the movie where he is talking but his lips are not moving, it was very distracting and annoying.
To conclude this review, I would have to say Madame Web is one of the worst comic book movies I have ever seen. It was poorly written and poorly edited.
