Here’s a recipe guaranteed to not sell movie tickets: How about a flick about Spider-Man, except Spider-Man ain’t in it?
Such is the premise of “Madame Web,” the latest box office disaster from Disney. At this point, they aren’t just milking the Marvel cash cow dry, they’re about to dehydrate it to death.
Where to begin with this debacle? The opening scene is your typical melodramatic cheese, with the mother of the titular heroine getting double-crossed by the villain of the picture in the jungles of Bolivia or something. There’s a subplot early on about some kind of trans-dimensional Spider-world or something, but odds are you’ll be too distracted by how cheap and shoddy the tarantula-warrior CGI effects look to notice.
From there, we skip a few decades ahead to 2003 — and the fact that contemporary movies are celebrating the early aughties as some sort of “ideal” time in American culture almost gives me the dry heaves. Our heroine is played by Dakota Johnson, who not only has difficulty emoting onscreen, pretty much the ENTIRE movie she has this smug, smarmy smirk on her face like she knows she’s above the material. Needless to say, pinning the success of the whole movie on her performance was a colossal mistake.
The big turning point of the movie comes when Dakota has a near-death experience crashing an ambulance and when she wakes up, she starts having visions of the future and stuff. Eventually, she comes to learn the deep, dark secret about what really happened to her mama, and along the way she becomes the proxy adoptive mother of three teenage girls (all played by women in their late 20s) who are destined to become Spider-Women themselves in the inevitable string of sequels. Of course, there’s a nefarious evil-doer lurking in the shadows, but your guess is as good as mine what his actual motivations are supposed to be.
It’s a bad movie already, but two things about “Madame Web” instantly catapult it into the cinematic nadir. First off, it does what so many contemporary movies without enough plot do to hit the optimal two-hour run-time — it pads out the screenplay with these long and totally pointless music videos masquerading as action sequences. Even worse, they’re giving us poorly choreographed kung-fu sequences set to BRITNEY SPEARS. What’s next, a car chase serenaded by Cher?
Then there’s the absolutely SHAMELESS corporate shilling going on, in particular, for Pepsi. I don’t even care about spoiling the ending for you (because let’s face it, nobody reading this is going to go out and watch it, anyway), but this may very well be the first movie ever released where a character is LITERALLY killed off by brazen product placement. Pretty much every time you think this movie hits a new low, it goes to Home Depot and buys an even bigger shovel.
Of course, the movie doesn’t have a real ending, just a convenient excuse to pump out about three or four more “Madame Web” sequels. But on the positive side, considering how little money this snoozer made at multiplexes, we might actually be spared the suffering.
There have been some BAD movies to come out already in 2024, but this one is going to be hard to top. With terrible acting, a predicable plot, atrocious special effects, wooden dialogue and pacing issues galore, “Madame Web” is an absolute chore to sit through; the Orkin Man should’ve showed up 20 minutes into this thing and put everybody out of their misery.
At my most generous, the absolute best I can afford this movie is a pitiful ONE PIECE OF POPCORN OUT OF FOUR rating — actually cleaning cobwebs off your ceiling fans would probably be more enjoyable.