Madame Web
“Madame Web” truly is a Marvel. Pun intended. A pun so lame it seems very appropriate for the absolute dumpster fire that is “Madame Web”, easily the worst Marvel movie of the last 30 years. Even Roger Corman's unreleased “Fantastic Four” that was created only to keep the character rights boasts better acting. I cannot stress how bad this movie is. Even “Morbius” is significantly better. Like not a little better, SIGNIFICANTLY better.
The acting in “Madame Web” will surely be looked back at being a low point for nearly everyone involved. The only saving grace is the always good Adam Scott, who is dreadfully underused and gets about 10 minutes of wasted screen time total. Everyone else should look back and be ashamed of everything to do with this. The villain who I won't even bother looking up the character or actor is absolutely pointless. Just a terminator with incredibly lame motivation that would have been kind of cool if they bothered to flesh out his character even a little bit. He has a sidekick that is never explained at all, and by the end of the movie is left a completely unresolved plot point. The actor has MULTIPLE scenes where strangely he had to be dubbed over after the fact, but it's so blatantly bad that it doesn't even sync up with the actor in the scene. I don't know if it was a cost issue or what, but the decisions are just baffling. Did they just realize they were committed to such a garbage project and wanted to pump it out as soon as possible and wash their hands of it, hoping it would make money off the Spider-Man name?
The main characters are all extremely unlikable. Like I was seriously rooting for the villain to finish them off. I can't remember more annoying leads in anything. Like...anything. This is “Baywatch” levels of bad. The main character herself, Madame Web, straight up sucks. For the first quarter of the movie they just give her horrible character decisions that make me react like “what a horrible person”, “what an odd reaction”, “I would distance myself from this person”. I had no desire to see her improve because she was so off putting. The changes she goes through aren't earned, and don't make any sense.
Also, there are really weird overtly obvious product placement moments with Pepsi that were just so bizarre. Like, whatever, people drink Pepsi, but it's so directly forced into scenes its incredibly noticeable, and not in a good way. Talking about things that are noticeable in a bad way; Madame Web is supposed to be a paramedic, yet the writer clearly spent a grand total of ZERO minutes researching anything to do with even basic first aid. It's a movie, sometimes you can look past stuff like this, but not here. It's so, SO bad.
I will say a couple nice things: there are a few cool shots of the villain running on buildings and some camera flips that change horizons. It looks pretty good (aside from the worse than CW level CGI), there are a few nice cinematography shots. And I guess the best compliment of all is that I made it through from start to finish. I was curious to see how they'd tie together the shitstorm, but even the ending was half-assed. The villain gets absolutely no conclusion.
Sometimes a movie goes above and beyond expectations. For a movie everyone expected to be bad, it really impressed me with how it was even worse than I could have imagined.
2/10
