‘Madame Web’ is the most baffling superhero movie in 30 years

When the full story of what Sony is doing with their Spider-Man movies without Spider-Man comes out, I’ll be more than curious to read the chapter on Madame Web. Yo I finally saw it this week, and it’s not just a bad movie, it’s so incomprehensible even on a conceptual level that I really have no idea how it was made. It feels like a strange dream that someone had filmed and I’m struggling to understand how this movie exists.

Yes, I recommend it. To be clear, this is firmly in the “it’s so terrible it’s fun to watch” camp, that rare gem where something is both horrible and unintentionally hilarious. This is The Room of superhero movies. Spoilers follow.

I’m not sure if it even makes sense to classify Madame Web as a superhero movie. The entire premise of the movie is that Cassie Web gains spider powers that are essentially a modified version of Peter Parker’s spider sense. But instead of feeling a tingle when a flying car is about to overtake you, it can see eight seconds to a few minutes into the future, and can alter a few things based on that. Probably the least exciting superpower I’ve ever seen.

But that’s all. Cassie has no other powers. The three girls she protects and who will eventually become Spider Women (but not in this movie!) have no powers. Only the bad guy, Ezekiel, dressed in a black Spirit Halloween spider suit, has powers, but he’s just… being quick and sticking to walls. He doesn’t even shoot webs. At one point he throws a grenade at them.

I’m trying to wrap my head around the concept of taking one of the more obscure Spider-Man comic book characters and not only basing a movie around her (making her decades younger in the process), but also touching on three versions of Spider-Woman ( well, one is Spider-Girl) who literally don’t get their powers at any point in the movie outside of the dream sequences. Oh, and we’ll throw in young Uncle Ben and the birth of Peter Parker for good measure. As someone said online, this is the best movie about Spider-Man’s uncle’s coworker ever made.

What happens when you have a movie where essentially none of the heroes have any real superpowers? You have a superhero movie with possibly the least amount of action there has ever been in the genre. Two “fights” against Ezekiel are simply Cassie first hitting him with a taxi and then, a few hours later, hitting him with an ambulance, because of course she doesn’t have super strength, speed, or webs. The only time her powers evolve is when she astral projects a version of herself to save the three spider girls at the same time. She kills the villain knowing where the debris will fall during the destruction of an exploding fireworks factory (!) and he will be hit by it. Despite this, she is still injured enough to be wheelchair-bound and blind, as the film believes she must somehow relate to the comic version of the character.

Once again, the Spider-Women part of this is the most baffling. You have at least two of the most in-demand young actors working today in this cast, Sydney Sweeney of Euphoria and Everyone But You and Getty Images red carpet fame, and you have Isabela Merced, who will star in Superman Legacy and The Last. of us in the next year or two. And somehow, you’ve turned them into proto-versions of powerless superheroes.

It’s incomprehensible why Sony didn’t just make a Spider-Woman movie here with one of these girls, or do something obvious like put Sweeney in a Black Cat movie. In fact, I feel sorry for Sydney Sweeney, since in interviews He said he did a lot of research on his comic character and tried to offer suggestions to make it more like the source material. Instead, she appears in costume for about 18 seconds in the film and is relegated to running and looking scared the rest of the time. There are also hints that she thought she would end up playing Spider-Woman in the MCU after this, so it seems like someone literally lied to her about that.

Nothing about this movie being made makes sense. You could even say that Morbius was making a feature film about a somewhat well-known spider villain, and part of Sony eventually set up its own Sinister Six. Meanwhile, Madame Web is billed as a stand-alone film that takes place 20 years ago and won’t connect to anything. I mean, at this point I don’t think want Madame Web to connect to anything given what we just saw here, but there’s really no point in what Sony is doing with these movies other than making them not get tax breaks or mass producing them so they don’t lose the Spider license somehow . .

See Madame Web. Seriously, I’m not kidding. You need to see what I’m talking about here, and there would be worse ways to spend 100 minutes with a friend. I guarantee you’ll have a ton of fun trying to figure out how the heck this exists.

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