Madame Web Review: Her Webs Entangle More Than They Unravel

Continuing their streak, Marvel has yet again brought us a movie that turned out to be as bad as it gets. Madame Web was released in theaters last week, and the movie is a total disaster. If we talk about casting, Madame Web’s cast had the potential to be used better than what we got to see in the film.

At this point, it is difficult for me to say that Madame Web (Dakota Johnson) is even made by Sony. If the intro credits don’t tell you that it is a Sony-produced movie, you would believe Madame Web was made by some teenagers with access to professional cameras.

Madame Web was supposed to be a grand stand-alone project by Sony and Marvel. However, after watching it I am left with the impression that it is nothing more than a cheap Spider-Man knockoff fused with Final Destination. Coming to the CGI of the movie, I don’t even know where to begin. If you ask me, Power Rangers back in the day managed to pull off better CGI and VFX than Sony did on this one.

In the scene where Johnson and her partner rescue people from the fireworks factory after Dakota realizes her character’s powers and the camera pans out, the scene literally looks like something out of a cartoon movie. But that’s not the worst of all. Instead, it’s all the plotholes that Madame Web spins over the course of two hours.

Madame Web: The Tale of Plotholes

Another thing I would like to talk about is the wormhole-sized plotholes in Madame Web. Okay, folks imagine this, a man dressed in a costume similar to our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is going around causing havoc in New York City. People see him and will most probably remember the costume of the person who destroyed the city. Now, after a few years, when Spider-Man shows up, nobody can make out the similarity and go on to trust him. Odd, isn’t it?

If you find what I just said a bit odd, let’s look at another example, Madame Web is set in the year 2003 in the Sony Spider-verse. Now, by the time Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man became a superhero, technically, she was already around. So, Sony, you are telling me, Madame Web is omnipresent, can look into the future, and can astral project, yet she let Gwen Stacy die?

Because as far as I have read about her in comic books, she is the one who always protects Spider-people. It seems that Sony and Marvel didn’t think this through and just slapped around different ideas to try and make a new Spidey movie.

Madame Web: The Web of Corny Dialogues

For once I could let bad screenplay and VFX slide but when it comes to the dialogues, that tickles a nerve of mine. If you listen to the dialogues of Madame Web, you will quite literally feel like you are watching a poorly dubbed Asian movie. If there was a corniness meter, Madame Web could be used as the maximum reading on it.

For example, one of the biggest messes in the movie is when Johnson goes to Peru and meets one of the superhuman men who saved her from dying as an infant. Here, Sony decided to spin one of the greatest lines in superhero history “With great power comes great responsibility.” The superhuman guy turned it into – “When you take on the responsibility, great power will come.”

Huh, my only question is, why? What AI rephrasing software are they using? The dialogues in this movie are cliché, dry, and generic that it almost feels like filmmakers made AI write the script when the Writer’s Guild went on strike.

Breaking a tradition, Madame Web doesn’t have a post-credit scene that could help us understand the future or the movie or how it fits with other Marvel movies.

Madame Web is a “cinematic disaster” that was made for reasons unknown.

Overall, Madame Web is a cinematic disaster that was made for reasons unknown. Nobody asked for a movie to be made like that. The appearance of Madame Web was clearly not thought through because if she had been around before everything that has been happening in the Sony Spider-verse, things could have been done differently.

In the pages of comic books, Madame Web is an excellent character with depth and charm but the live-action version just turned out to be as bland as it gets.