It’s no surprise that it’s been a rocky couple of years for the superhero genre. Apart from a couple of triumphs such as No Way Home, The Batman and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, there’s been a lot of duds and failed experiments. However, no Phase 4 or 5 Marvel project reeks of being made for a paycheck as much as Sony’s tie-in Spiderman movies, and with Madame Web they have plummeted to a new low.
The film was clearly a mess from start to finish
I didn’t think it was possible to limbo under the bar set by 2022’s Morbius, but somehow Dakota Johnson is a less likeable lead than one played by the astronomically arrogant Jared Leto. Johnson is trying her best, but she’s way out of her depth here and the script is just giving her nothing to work with. At least Matt Smith was able to make Morbius somewhat entertaining at points. Here there’s nothing, especially when it comes to the villain.
Not only is Ezekial Sims a poor excuse for an antagonist, but he’s also the victim of the most glaringly bad ADR work I think I’ve seen in a big-budget film, where half of his dialogue doesn’t even match his mouth movements. It’s actually inexcusable.
The film was clearly a mess from start to finish. There’s been many behind-the-scenes stories of extensive reshoots and often whole ideas and scenes being scrapped, and they are blatantly obvious here, with a really rough edit job as well as a confused sense of time and place. The film is said to take place in 2003, but there’s so many needle drops of 1990s rock songs that it makes me think the film was supposed to take place in that decade.
The backstories are vague and clunky, the characterisation is amateurish and paper-thin, and the pacing is non-existent
The script is also inexcusably weak. It’s becoming trademark for screenwriters Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless (the writers of Morbius as well as other cinematic masterpieces such as Gods of Egypt) to have unintentionally hilarious lines of dialogue, but at least the plot of Morbius was somewhat coherent. Madame Web by contrast is almost incomprehensible. The backstories are vague and clunky, the characterisation is amateurish and paper-thin, and the pacing is non-existent, making a fairly average 1 hour 55 minute runtime feel a lot longer than it is. Oh, and the film seemingly can't go five minutes without referencing Spiderman.
I don’t want to seem completely down on this film, but honestly I’m struggling to find any positives. I do feel really sorry for everyone involved, who I imagine and hope are better than this material, but this is a failure in just about every single sense. There’s the occasional funny moment, and some of the action scenes are reasonably well-filmed, but that’s nowhere near enough to make it even remotely worth watching.
Madame Web also proves that Sony has learned absolutely nothing in the last twenty years. Ever since Spiderman 3 in 2007, they’ve had a nasty habit of messing about with directors’ visions and mandating unnecessary changes that turn the project into something completely different from what it was supposed to be. Even with that said though, they normally don’t turn out this bad. I’ve never liked the Andrew Garfield Spiderman movies, but at least the actors are usually able to make the film bearable. It seems now the films are just being churned out on a conveyor belt without any respect for ideas the directors or actors might have.
I’d say that the critical drubbing Madame Web is receiving will hopefully be a wake-up call for Sony, but given their track record of not learning from any of their mistakes, I’m not exactly hopeful.
OK, rant over.
