I’m off work with covid, so I decided I may as well use the time to finally endure
Madame Web and see what the fuss is about. In short, working would have been preferable.
This is the second worst Marvel film I’ve seen, with The Eternals being the absolute worst (mainly because it’s longer). Even the rightfully-buried, pre-MCU disaster that was Elektra was better. The writing and acting are at the level of a high school talent show skit, minus the talent. Dakota Johnson is dead behind the eyes, impossible to root for - I’ve seen sock puppets with more personality. The first half consists almost entirely of her having pre-cognitive visions and being confused about it in a variety of situations, like someone’s baby shower or a catastrophe at the docks. On a side note, I missed how she knows the pregnant woman or the relevance, but they keep coming back to her as though she’s somehow part of the story, when she’s not at all.
Anyway, eventually a doctor tells DJ to watch some old movies to fix it, so she watches A Christmas Carol (despite it not being Christmas time at any other point of the story) so she can scoff at Scrooge suggesting that his visions are only things that may be, not will be. Then immediately she has a vision of a pigeon hitting her window and she prevents its death by opening the window. Superpower established, it’s time to… spend more time being confused while kidnapping three teenagers, convincing them they’re in mortal danger, then abandoning them to said peril, only to return in the nick of time and berate them for being in peril.
I spaced out for the final third, which is a dreary CGI mess, and I lost track of what the deal is with the villain. He’s bad and something something spiders? If anything, his performance is worse than DJ’s - which is an impressive feat - with line deliveries that barely register as human. There’s a truly terrible scene early on where he’s in a bed with a character called Beautiful Woman (I checked), making insipid pleasantries, then without skipping a beat or changing tone he starts talking about jungle spiders and an NSA conspiracy. Because - would you believe it - Beautiful Woman works for the NSA!
Incidentally, the NSA password he tortures out of her is only 8 characters long, which was the most entertaining moment of the film.
3/10
