Madame Web

Madame Web is like those porn parodies of superhero movies, but someone cut all the sex out of it, leaving only crappy visual effects, terrible actors and ridiculous dialogue. (2024.02.15)

As I did a couple of years ago with Cats, I decided to go to the cinema to see Madam Web despite the very poor reviews and knowing that it might be a waste of money. Madame Web stumbles on multiple levels, like the vastly untapped potential that lay in the premise with its vision of the future, the lacklustre villain, to the off-kilter decisive confrontation with a downright stupid ending being the "bitter cherry on top". But the rating here still strikes me as quite severe, despite the glaring flaws, the film deserves two stars (but not a millimeter of cobwebs more). (2024.03.02)

What a weird Pepsi commercial... Sony continues to make C-rated comic book crap that seems to ignore everything blockbuster filmmakers have learned in the last twenty years, and instead proudly follow on the footsteps of films like Catwoman. Some of the creative choices here are utterly incomprehensible in terms of cinematography, sound and editing (the terrible CGI is not worth talking about), but the script and the way the story is told, that's a treat. For some reason, almost all the flashbacks in the film are repeated exactly twice without exception, and everything that is clearly explained visually has to be recited out loud by one of the characters for good measure. Always. In short, Sony thinks its audience are complete morons, and even then it doesn't make any better sense. At least Morbius was more fun. (2024.02.15)

I like films to reflect the time in which they are set by the way they are made. For example, Madam Web is set in 2003, which is also the year of the infamous Daredevil, which was very similarly bad, but better in that it at least had a coherent plot and not many people remember it anymore. Madame Web, on the other hand, is a fresh comic book flick. It makes no sense, it's boring, at best bizarre, at best unintentionally funny, but that's up to the audience's benevolence. I was initially entertained harmlessly, the film promising me in the first half hour or so that it would focus on Cassandra as well as the Parker family, that it would tell us something about Spider-Man's parents, uncle and aunt that we didn't know or hadn't seen, and that Madame Web would play some significant role in their fates. But alas. I'm not sure why, but the writers decided to flick the proverbial switch to another, ultimately literally dead-end track full of clichés and dullness. (2024.02.28)