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| Image courtesy Sony Pictures |
Sony's live action Spider-Verse continues to unspool in their latest unwatchable mess of a film, Madame Web. The movie, for all intents and purposes, is an enormous trash heap that capitalizes on Dakota Johnson's unwillingness to emote along with three talented younger actresses that are given zero to work with. Sit around and look cute, they said. Do nothing else.
The script is barren of any stakes and creates nothing but incongruent plot holes for a series of films that has no bearing on anything other than wasting a budget on terribly rendered action sequences and computer-generated visuals straight out of the late '90s. It aligns with nothing they've done in this universe to date while sadly attempting to connect to the Peter Parker storyline unsuccessfully. We should all be thankful for that.
Madame Web creeps slowly and boringly through a baseline story about a bad man in a spidey-suit that wants to destroy three teenage female webslingers that will come for him in the future. Enter one stone faced, bored to tears Dakota Johnson that's here to save the day and to vanquish the evil-doer with her mystical arachnid powers from the jungles and caverns of Peru. Johnson is just not fit to carry the weight of a comic book franchise, much less a movie THIS bad. She's embarrassingly devoid of any emotion and has no issue showing that she can't react to anything with surprise or dynamic. She stands around looking bored to tears even when her character's life is in peril.
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| I'm so bored. Anyone have a sandwich? |
Enter one Tahar Rahim as the villain Ezekiel Sims, who is woefully miscast as the antagonist. Either this man can't act or he's just doing his damnedest to ham it up for bored to tears audiences. Nearly all of his lines are quite obviously overdubbed and sound unnatural to the point of offensiveness. Adding in the trio of Sydney Sweeney, who is really too talented for this rubbish, Isabela Merced, who was amazing in the live action Dora The Explorer movie, and Celeste O'Connor, a rising star in several genre films, ends up dragging this rubbish straight to the landfill of movie history. And then keeps piling it on.
When the Venom films can be comparatively considered works of art, there's a serious problem at Sony Pictures. Madame Web is a symptom of a studio that has no idea what they're doing with characters that should be interesting and treated with some level of respect. And the fact that none of these female heroes are even seen in their suits for more than sixty seconds of screen time screams desperation. They want a sequel SO bad but definitely won't be getting one. I usually hate the term, "No one asked for this". Well, no one asked for this.
This is bottom rung comic book movie making that only adds more steam to the current talk of oversaturation and fatigue. A few years ago Madame Web might have been considered fun for the sake of its corniness. Now, it's just another movie that will quickly make it to streaming before anyone even has a chance to ask why the hell they're trying to rewrite the history of Ben Parker and Mary Parker in a flick that has no right to even be connected to anything in the current run of Disney/Marvel Spider-Man films.
We've heard of several big budget studio flicks being pulled from the release schedule lately. Well, Madame Web is one of those that might have been better off as a limited series or a streaming show because this straight up did not work as a movie whatsoever. The people behind this one should retire. There is nothing to like here. And advertising this thing as an action film featuring three kick ass spider heroines was a total misdirect. Stay at home. Save your money.
Yes. They also waste Emma Roberts and Adam Scott in this drivel. Out.
-CG