'Madame Web'... I saw it. Yep, it's a piece of shit.

0/5 STARS

Okay, so I finally watched “Madame Web” in order to catch up on 2024 films that I may have missed from earlier in the year. Going into this movie, I knew it wasn’t going to be good based on film reviews and what others had told me when they saw the movie… so the bar was set low. It was so low, in fact, that it was on the damn ground.

Somehow, this movie dug a six foot hole and crawled under the motherfucking bar. Everything about this movie was terrible… well, almost everything. I did manage to find one good note. In the movie, Adam Scott does play a young Ben Parker and gives a good performance but Ben is not a big central part of this movie so no matter how good Scott did in the role, it was never going to be enough to save this dumpster fire of a movie.

Let’s go ahead and get the lame synopsis out of the way. In 1973, a pregnant woman was trying to find a rare spider in Peru that could have the power to heal and grant powers to anyone it bites. Just as she finds the spider, her fellow explorer Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim) betrays her, shoots her, and steals the spider.

Then, a group of “spider-people” come to her rescue. While she will die in childbirth, they allow one of the spiders to bite her so that her soon-to-be-born daughter will survive. The lady gives birth and the main spider-person says that when the daughter realizes that she has powers, she can seek him out for answers in the future.

Cassandra Webb must protect three teens from the worst villain of all time.

Fast forward to 2003, the daughter turns out to be a paramedic aptly named Cassandra Webb, blandly played by Dakota Johnson who looks like she wants to be anywhere else but making this movie. As mentioned before, Scott is her fellow paramedic, Ben Parker… Yes, that Ben Parker. Anyway, there is an accident on the job where Cassandra almost dies and this opens up her powers.

Now, she has discovered that she can somewhat see into the future and prevent terrible things before they happen. Meanwhile, Ezekiel has similar powers in addition to others due to the “curse” of the spider he stole. He has been plagued by visions of three women in spider costumes killing him at some point in the future.

Therefore, his whole plot is to try and find the three girls while they are teenagers so that he can kill them and prevent his destiny. The girls are Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced), and Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor). Thankfully for them, Cassandra uses her powers to save them from Ezekiel and now they are on the run with Cassandra suddenly becoming a protector of the three girls.

Okay, so first off, the plot is just fucking dumb. Ezekiel is played by Rahim as a one note, monotone villain. Granted, Rahim does not have much to work with here on this film, but his goddamn terrible performance doesn’t help things. I seriously wanted to plug my ears any time he was talking.

Seriously, this villain fucking sucks as does the actor's performance.

I’ve already mentioned that Johnson looked like she wanted to be in any other movie than this, but the same can be said about Sweeney, Merced, and O’Connor. They’re just going through the paces with a shitty script. A script that actually involved five writers and all they managed to do was churn out this complete piece of shit.

The direction and cinematography is all over the place and the movie is completely tone deaf. It doesn’t know if it wants to be a slightly more light-hearted superhero film or a downright serious one and it turns out to succeed at being neither.

Then there are the constant fucking reminders that this is supposedly set in a world that will eventually have Spider-Man in it. The “spider-people” at the beginning of the movie are painted up red and have twigs all around them that make them look like Spider-Man. Not only is Uncle Ben here, but so is his pregnant sister and they’re all wondering one thing… What will the child’s name be? Hmm, I fucking wonder. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more.

Oh, she goes blind... in the dumbest fucking way possible.

I shit you not, there is even a point where someone says the line, “When you take on the responsibility, great power will come.” Ooh, writers, look at you. You thought you were so clever fucking around with Spider-Man’s most famous line.

Think about this for a moment. This movie had to be pitched to Sony, they had to accept it, they had to hire several writers to write it, they went through pre-production getting everything set up which included building sets, hiring the crew, and casting all the roles. They then had to shoot this garbage and then it had to enter post-production where it had to be edited and the shitty effects were added and the bland musical score was finally put into place.

I wonder if anyone in the cast or crew was just standing around one day and either thought or said out loud, “I think we may have just created one of the worst films ever made. Nay, one of the worst things ever made.”

Because that is what ultimately hit me after I watched the movie and I thought about it for a minute. I really wish that Disney would pay Sony to save these characters from Sony’s grasp and the shitty film universe that they’ve been trying to set up over the past two decades. This is not just easily the worst film of 2024. This is one of the worst movies I have ever seen in all the years that I’ve been watching movies.