You don’t need supernatural foresight to anticipate that Madame Web would be a catastrophic movie. My expectations were already low, but even I wasn’t fully prepared for how atrocious it turned out to be. I regard this movie in the same vein as those early to mid-2000s superhero movies: aggressively stupid, poorly produced, and with everyone involved seemingly mentally disassociated from the project.
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Madame Web has some of the worst dialogue you could ever write for a film. It’s an unnatural composition of expositing plot and character motivations, where the script is practically screaming at you. Writers, Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless totally violate the “show, don’t tell” approach to telling a story, where characters will say some of the most absurd things a person could say. The delivery of these lines makes this even worse, where the actors are simply re-reading without any emotion.
Dakota Johnson’s performance falls flat, along with her one-dimensional co-stars, Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O’Connor and Isabela Merced. Tahar Rahim’s portrayal of the villain was abysmal, possibly the weakest among them all. With this lackluster combination, none of the characters become compelling in a very conventional story. The directing fails to add much depth or weight to the narrative either.
Some of the worst editing I have seen in a superhero movie since Suicide Squad is on full display here, both in the rapid-fire film cutting and awkwardly inserted sound editing. Some bad cinematography is at play that extracts you from what is transpiring from the scene. It’s also to no surprise that the VFX are hilariously awful, with exaggerated character motions sticking out like a sore thumb.
Movies like Madame Web, as terrible as they are, serve a much more significant purpose: they are quite hysterical. Between this and Morbius (2022), I believe Madame Web, directed by S. J. Clarkson, to succeed more as a so-bad-it’s good type of movie. This is the saving grace of a truly incompetent piece of s**t film.
Follow Zach (the Author) on IG – @pretentiousfilmcritic
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