PREMISE
Cassandra Webb is a New York metropolis paramedic who begins to demonstrate signs of clairvoyance. Forced to challenge revelations about her past, she needs to safeguard three young women from a deadly adversary who wants them destroyed.
THE GOOD MILDLY KINDA OKAY STUFF
DAKOTA JOHNSON?- I guess I’ll give credit where credit is due here because I (and possibly only I) truly feel that Dakota Johnson is run down a lot more than she should be. Those FIFTY SHADES movies really ruined her reputation as an actress, and it’s a real shame. If you’ve seen any of her smaller movies you would know that she got skills. People are just mean, and I’m reeeeeally trying to not be mean here.
I don’t know if she was sold on the idea that Madame web could be a much bigger film than it ever had the capability to be, but she’s trying ULTRA hard to make the most out of this. Her chemistry with Adam Scott is the best part about this movie, and if this were a buddy cop kind of situation involving these two characters then this could be a flat-out enjoyable movie. Sadly that was not the case.
THE BAD STUFF
CAMERA GIMMICKS- After seeing this film I was overwhelmingly compelled to look up what the budget was, and I was not shocked to see that the budget was 80 million. That is unbelievably low for a film that seems to be kind of important to Sony. Why was I compelled to look up the budget you ask? Well, because I know that the Marvel film from Sony that was released last year morbius had a similar budget, and boy does this look the same in many ways.
The camera work, however, is somehow worse in this movie. There’s shaky cam bulls*** that dominates a scene whenever something action-ish tends to happen. There’s this weird instazoom effect type of dogs*** whenever they want to focus on a character’s facial expression during an action scene, or whenever a character pops a one-liner. There’s this splice effect horses*** whenever Madame Web has a flashback, and for some reason there’s this loud sound effect that just plays like a boo scare whenever she does have to use her powers. There’s just a lot of unnecessary style to something that could have been filmed straight up and been more effective in doing so.
CGI- 80 million is a lot of money. And I don’t think you have anybody that would demand a Tom Hardy-ish kind of paycheck that would balloon your budget to anything past 80 million… So in cases like these, I have to ask where exactly does the money go? I can only assume it’s to make the CGI in your superhero movie look as good as possible right?
This here is atrocious looking. I am not a computer artist of any kind. Nor am I a specialist in criticizing the profession obviously. However, the underwater sequences look so terrible at times I kind of wondered if any actor truly had to actually be submerged underwater for any of these sequences.
I figure it might be possible that every underwater sequence is fully CGI rendered. Given how bad this looks, it would make total sense.
THE UGLY STUFF
DIALOGUE- I’m pretty sure I pointed this out in past reviews, but “on the nose” dialogue is defined as character lines that either state the obvious — information that we or the characters already know — or communicate exactly what the characters are thinking with little to no subtlety or subtext. Perhaps it’s the heat of the moment here, but I’ve never seen a movie with the sheer quantity of on-the-nose dialogue then this movie here. It is in every single solitary scene of this film.
And because Madame web is a film that is not making fun of itself, and is taking things extremely seriously, this makes a whole bunch of things that were already really bad and turns the volume up to f****** 12 and a half. I really don’t know when the breaking point was for the audience that I saw this with but at some point at the beginning of the third act there was hysterical laughter at multiple points of the story no matter how dramatic the story wanted to try and get.
On the nose dialogue in 2024 is the killer of all killers when it comes to the quality of a film. It’s like you’re underestimating the intelligence of your audience to not get the subtext of what’s going on. And madame Web really thinks its audience is unintelligent people.
TAHAR RAHIM- What in the absolute f*** happened here? For those of you who don’t know, Tahar Rahim was absolutely robbed of an Oscar nomination in 2009 for his Caesar award-winning performance in a movie called a prophet. He is an amazing actor, full stop. And yet, if you went into this movie not knowing who he was, you would think that he is nothing less than the worst actor ever put in a major motion picture and you would have every justifiable right to.
Furthermore, the lines are delivered in such a wooden manner that it flat-out sounds like AI. I am very much impelled to look up clips of something he’s done recently to see if his voice really sounds like that. Because I doubt it does. Am I insane in thinking that?
**************
The question shouldn’t be if this is a good movie. That’s a ridiculous question in every way. The question should be if this movie is worse than Morbius. And you know what? That’s a good debate to have. If you are a hardcore comic fan you could probably find 7 or 8 more egregiously horrendous things in this movie that the common fan cannot see.
But that in and of itself says something about these “In Association with Marvel” movies that Sony does. Venom was lightning in a bottle. Those films are B-movies, they know that they’re B-movies, and Tom Hardy is giving such a gonzo performance in every direction, that it’s hard not to be entertained by those movies. If every one of these Sony Marvel movies would just have the same mentality as the venom franchise does and poke fun at themselves on purpose…then we could all have a good time with something like Madame web. We’d all be in on the joke, and everybody could go home happy.
But Madame web is taking itself very seriously. So did morbius, and so will Kraven the Hunter. And I just can’t understand why that is the case. Â
MADAME WEB is in theaters now
