‘Madame Web’ swings into disaster
Sony’s “Madame Web” is a fresh take on the popular Marvel universe franchise “Spider Man”, and might be the worst movie I’ve ever seen.
The film lacked technical aspects, humor and really any emotion. The plot follows Cassandra Webb, a young paramedic played by Dakota Johnson, as she unveils her psychic powers and uses them to fight evil. Along the way she meets three girls that seem to be connected: Julia Carpenter played by Sydney Sweeney, Mattie Franklin played by Celeste O’Conner, and Anya Corazón played by Isabela Merced. They come to find out that Cassandra’s powers stemmed from a spider bite she received as a baby. Raised as an orphan, Cassandra lost her mother just minutes after she was born in the jungles of Peru leaving most of heritage a mystery. In order to channel her powers, she must return to the tribe of spider people in the jungles of Peru where she was originally bitten.
In all honesty, the whole script felt like it could have been written by AI. There was a lack of emotion behind the script and the whole story was very predictable which made the movie very hard to enjoy. Even worse though was the editing. It is hard to say if I watched a movie or a two hour edit of clips off of CapCut. The camera angles switched so frequently it gave me whiplash. The shaky cameras were definitely a choice but all it did was give me a headache.
The movie felt very patched together, almost as if there were major scenes cut. Additionally the movie was set in 2003 but gave no indication of that in the costumes, trends, or really anything.The fight scenes were poorly choreographed and gave little to no anticipation and had to have been some of the worst special effects I’ve ever seen.
In the last scene Cassandra, Julia, Mattie and Anya are fighting the evil villian, Ezekial portrayed by Tahar Rahim, at a warehouse. The scene fighting is very predictable and honestly quite boring. The sequences seem forced and repetitive and leave viewers wanting a more action packed finale to the film. However, the worst part of the movie by far was the complete inaccuracy of Cassandra’s career as a paramedic. In typical situations paramedics work a certain amount of hours each shift, usually 24 hour increments, however in this film Cassandra seemed to just be on call. Her shifts seemed short and she kind of just went as she pleased. In one scene while on shift, she jumps into a car hanging off the edge of a bridge without any safety gear, backup, or thought. While I may not be a paramedic I’m 90% sure that breaks some sort of safety code.
Overall if I had to recommend a good action packed movie it would not be this one. Between the poor performances in acting and the even poorer technical effects, this might be among one of the worst superhero films of all time.
