Madame Web

This weekend, Sony's newest Spider-verse story, Madame Web, releases in theaters. Madame Web follows paramedic Cassandra Webb as she begins to have the power to see into the future. When she sees a vision of three girls getting killed, she intervenes and finds herself having to protect these girls from an unknown threat. I went into this with very low expectations, none of these movies from Sony have been great and I am not sure why they continue doing them. For this film, I was hoping that it would at least keep me moderately entertained.

To get right to the point, this movie is bad. It's not so bad that it loops around to being good, it is just bad. It isn't an unwatchable abomination but more of a forgettable level of bad. To its credit, the movie is trying to go for more of a throwback comic book thriller, and I feel it achieves decent enough. The big issue with this movie is that it is more concerned with forcing in a bunch of Peter Parker easter eggs and trying to set up a Spider-Woman movie than it is trying to tell a good story. None of the characters have any sense of personality or are memorable in any way. The villain is just straight-up awful. All the movie gives is that he's a rich guy who has a magic spider. There is nothing about why he is bad or why he wants the spider. He is just there to try and kill these three girls. The attempt to set up these three girls as spider heroes is also quite poor. By the end of the story, there is nothing done to fulfill their evolution and nothing is even remotely satisfying. The movie also puts no time into growing Cassandra's character and literally just ships her off to the Amazon to get an exposition dumb and then magically understand her powers. The movie also doesn't have any sort of satisfying conclusion and just goes for the most generic ways to end the story. Between this movie and Morbius, it has become very clear that the only reason Sony is putting out these movies is to make sure they keep the rights to Spider-Man. They have no intention of actually making good movies.

Overall, this is a dull movie with poor writing and forgettable characters and is once again proof that these Spider-Man characters should really be in the hands of another studio.

Score:4.5/10 Grade: C- Recommendation: Skip it.