Quick synopsis: Cassandra Webb is a New York City paramedic who starts to show signs of plot convenient-clairvoyance.

I was supposed to watch this a week earlier, but I was unable to go down to the cinema due to a random bout of sickness. Now I’ve not only recovered from illness but have managed to catch this at the cinema I can finally say…

I miss the days when I was ill.

Going to start by saying this; Madame Web is not as bad as Morbius. Morbius had absolutely nothing going for it. MW at least has one GORGEOUS shot, sets something up for the future (which now probably won’t happen), and ends with a Cranberries song. I mean, the rest of the film is dogshit though.

I actually went into this knowing it would be terrible. I don’t think that affected my viewpoint though. I mean, I went into Ghostbusters: Afterlife having only seen negative reviews, and that won me over. Conversely, I went into Wolf expecting it to be great and that………was not. It wasn’t just the early reviews that caused me to think this, it was the trailer too. The trailer said absolutely nothing about who this character is, or why we should bother paying for a ticket to see her movie.

I don’t get how Sony decided that THIS was the movie they wanted to release. They picked the screenwriters of Morbius FFS. How does that make sense? “Hey, these two people wrote one of the worst movies of all time, let’s hire them again”. The plot is DUMB, the dialogue is some of the worst I’ve ever seen, and the characters are badly written. It feels like it was written by AI; nobody speaks or behaves like an actual human. Nothing really has consequences. Cassie is thought to have kidnapped the children, so she has to hide out with the teens to avoid suspicion. All standard so far. But there’s not really a reason for people to believe that. There were witnesses to the police being attacked by the villain, and all it would have taken was one of the multiple police officers on the scene to radio in “It’s a man in a Spider costume”. At least one person would have seen the villain get off the moving train too. They also would have seen him pace down the train whilst angrily staring at the teens. The kidnapping (which happens during working hours), is later reported in that day’s newspapers. You know, newspapers are famous for 3pm printings and distributions, everybody loves picking up a newspaper on the way home from work instead of in the morning. That’s such an easy problem to fix too, just show it on a TV screen. It only seems to be done via newspaper so the film can get a daily bugle reference in.

Usually when I’m writing a script I go through one draft where I delete the names and see if I can figure out who is who just by character actions and dialogue. You could not do that with MW. Characters change personalities from scene to scene, going from nervous and bookish, scared of drawing attention to themselves, to dancing on the table in a diner (completely sober).

The song that woman is dancing to? Toxic by Britney Spears. A song which wasn’t released until January 2004, in a film set in 2003. Why is it set in 2003? No idea. I’ve heard rumours it’s so they could tie it into the Andrew Garfield films, then the Tom Holland ones, then realised none of those timelines work. I’m not entirely sure I would believe that, but it would back up the absolute clusterfuck that is this movie. It being set in 2003 adds nothing. I suppose you could argue it means that you can use Uncle Ben as a living character. I mean, him being Uncle Ben adds NOTHING, if anything it makes Spider-Man a worse character, as it means he likely based himself on the supervillain from this film. All the 2003 setting adds is weirdness, especially in terms of music. It’s not just “that song wasn’t out yet”, it sometimes goes too far the other way, using too many songs from the 80s and 90s. I don’t think many radio stations in 2003 would play the 1987 Tiffany song I Think We’re Alone Now early in the morning. It doesn’t feel very 2003, and unlike the Spider-Verse soundtrack, it doesn’t feel very New York. Except for a Yeah Yeah Yeahs song near the start, it’s the most generic soundtrack outside of royalty-free music. That’s not the most offensive part of the audio though; it feels like a lot of Tahar Rahim’s dialogue was rerecorded in post-production. Sometimes it’s not as noticeable, his mouth being obscured, but then there are some times when the dialogue doesn’t match his mouth movements at all. That’s not just bad, that’s a failing grade at film school.

MW doesn’t even have the decency to look good, it overdoes the swoopy 180 shot. Some of the action scenes are incomprehensible in terms of staging and choreography. That being said, there is one PERFECT shot; a car quickly drives away, turning as it does so. The shot is a standard “snow gets kicked up into the air by a speeding tyre”, but with broken glass. It looks absolutely stunning and may be one of my favourite shots of the year. But other than that? It’s like a glass of cloudy lemonade left for four days; it’s murky, it’s flat, and it’s ugly.

So that’s established that the script is shit, the directing is shit, and the sound is shit, what of the performances? Sydney Sweeney, Isabella Merced and Celeste O’Connor are good and I would like to see a full-length Spider-Women movie featuring them (just with a different director and screenwriter). That’s actually my main takeaway from this; it was a trailer for a film that will now never be mad. I don’t know how much Emma Roberts was paid but considering her level of stardom it was undoubtedly too much for how little she’s in it. Adam Scott is fun, but again, isn’t in it enough to really be memorable. So, no issues with casting there.

Dakota Johnson is fucking terrible though.