Madame Web (2024)

Madame-Web-(2024)
Madame Web (2024)

When it comes to Dakota Johnson, that is a question I am not prepared to respond to. In any conventional way, is she a ‘good’ actor? I can’t say if there is enough proof to come to such a conclusion. A disrespectful actor, I think: when a bum script is handed to her, as it has with Madame Web, she does not even try to play along like e.g. British actors who are classically trained and take the craft seriously and try to make something out of the character they are handed in the script. No, as we saw in Fifty Shades of Grey, which was ostensibly her movie stardom debut and which she starred in, and its two Ikea-style sequels if there was any ambiguity that the script was not worth it, she did not bother hiding it. She does not put any effort into the writing, she performs in such a half-hearted manner. She sings and howls and rolls her eyes throughout the whole movie which is these days extreme and frankly, makes no sense.

Is this commendable? Is it worthy of respect? Is it suitable for an actor who is being paid to do it this way and for the project to be treated with such disdain? I do not know, but I will say this on Johnson’s behalf: Madame Web already doesn’t even try to be good, and her cringe-inducing performance is one of the very, very few things in the movie that feels like it has a heartbeat. So I would, at the very least, not like to watch the revised edition of the movie where she is not performing as she is.

From what I can tell, the script is quite horrible in this case. And that is not very far. Watching the film’s credits is like looking for layers in an excavation site: the latest script revision credits are to Claire Parker and S.J. Clarkson. They are also the feature’s director; rather than her feature directorial debut, and that is a modification to the draft developed by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless who were also credited with shaping the later version of Kerem Sanga’s script. And that is just the individuals who were credited on the screen, which is particularly quite not the complete list in this case. Of those five names, three of them don’t have considerably impressive screenwriting bios which could give them expectations whereas Sazama and Sharpless make a strong case for having the most bleak bibliography among screenwriters at their level: Dracula Untold (2014), Last Witch Hunter (2015), Gods of Egypt (2016), story credits for Power Rangers (2017) and then the rotten cherry on top, Morbius (2022) which is allegedly set in the same superhero universe as Madame Web. And whatever comes out of Madame Web, I do not believe that there is any near the level of gross incompetence as demonstrated in Morbius about that film.

In any case, looking at Sazama & Sharpless’s mortuary full of cinematic corpses, it would not be unfair to even claim that Madame Web was rotten from the bones up and perhaps it was but it is not quite right to say that. The ‘nothing’ that would be accurate in describing Madame Web is that it was currently developed beyond redemption entirely, totally as if by a deranged butcher with a poultry knife, who could not be restrained, during editing. So was Morbius, and that is quite a sad thing to have to try, of all things, to use as the basis of a cinematic universe. Anyway, just like with that one, there is a film called Madame Web, which has nothing somewhat structurally as absolutely preposterous as that film’s quest to present a story with no beginning and no end.

We even know some of the details: this was postponed from the third part in the nineties and moved to the beginning of the two thousand at some point very late in the game. This explains why there is an utterly gratuitous shot of Johnson lowering her head to address the camera with a dreary nervous bunny timbre straight from a hostage video. After all, it is reasonable to assume that not everyone agreed on how much of this should be associated with the typical idea of Spider-Man, the Marvel superhero, and how much should be associated with the notion of the specific Spider-Man who has been portrayed by Tom Holland in Avengers: Infinity War and other pictures. I do not know how this was because the Sony attorneys had to determine how much it could be about the Tom Holland Spider-Man before the lawyers of Disney’s Hell would be lowered on them.

In direct response to this question: just enough that spare parts unadorned Keller Kirry\’s workpiece could be called “Ben Parker” (Adam Scott) but not quite enough for the first-born nephew of Ben Parker to bear the name of “Peter”. Additionally, Ben recently began a relationship and in the most blatant exposition possible regarding a character who needs no first name of “May” it is made clear that this woman is not Benjamin’s aunt “May”.

The result was a rather uneven collage of ADR’d lines, additional inserts, and scenes that tried very hard to Kuleshov effect themselves from cuts shot obviously on different days with different units. In one of these moments, Cassandra rushes over three establishing shots in the Peruvian rain forest and locks the camera to the location, which is bizarre because none of these shots appear to be in chronological order.

Yes, this part, and indeed everything else, is very bad and in fact, I have barely managed to scrape the surface of this. Oh, let me get right to the point. Speaking as the bad guy Ezekiel Sims, Tahar Rahim has redubbed each and every one of his lines, in an accent which now I think is the main reason for redubbing since it is hilariously terrible despite all the curse words. In either the vain hope of compelling themselves to imagine a sequel will be made, or the disgusting realization there will be no sequel that has a cat chance in hell and they have to wrap things up fast, I cannot tell which. A final scene of such beatifically wrong-headed tonal contrast to the rest of the movie is sutured on. The color grading is wicked over there, shifting everything to teal shade and shadows to slightly blue over the light but light over the teal shade caused the movie to look very blue.

The main plot of the story revolves around three adolescent females who, despite the fact that they’re just barely introduced in this picture, are supposed to have vaguely important superpowers, none of which ever present themselves, and who have been defined in the screenplay to the extent that even the detail that they’re three distinct races was sometimes not quite sufficient for me to tell who was who (the white one is as usual played by 2024’s new It Girl Sydney Sweeney, so that helps).

So, let’s get back to the very first question posed by Dakota Johnson Am I, in any way, persuaded by the fact that Cassandra Webb is a real-life person? Not at all. Is it yes correct that she has an idea of what the hell is wrong with Cassandra’s superpower (who bears the name “Cassandra Webb,” the only truly believable superpower that can be ascribed to her is the ability to see the future through a spider’s eyes an ability to know the future through the web which is rather obscure and not always clear) Yes, we can say. Would counteractor be a more adequate role for Ms. Johnson and other actors to make for a better movie? Absolutely not. For all her trouble working with, her blind confidence in her own rage might be the single most human quality in Madame Web and even then, it’s not a quality the movie can ‘do’ anything with. This is not a movie that’s trying to undermine itself by being a stupidly ironic parody but Johnson’s performance in the Fifty Shades trilogy may have been narrowly like that. At least that gives nobody the right to pretend that it can be any worse than it already is.

And I will say, against the film’s very little merit: S.J. Clarkson is trying and I guess there is some success here. Going forward, there are times when the film is more about Cassandra who feels largely confused by her spiderluck visions but isn’t so lost in the haze of things that when something she ‘thought’ looked different, is definitely the same thing now and the context helps her disorientation a little which is the expectation at most times from the generic sections of the film, if most such scenes were done with simple construction aesthetics and repeated aims then making scenes where the protagonist tries to understand what she can see would be easy and very basic thriller aspects would come into play, and thankfully without sentient lighthouses neither Thor nor the script presently assumes she ever could. Passes and most importantly, don’t spare throughout the occasional magical spider visions which are kind of zany in their haphazardly spread out trippy imagery fits this sort of picture because it is the right type of goofy where the film lightly teases itself being a silly B-picture which could have for example, been set in an on-screen world with dull, interchangeable diners as large portions of its run time and the ‘B picture’ nature would come across as adorably flimsy, as opposed to outright dull and embarrassing. But, unfortunately, it is 2024, and ‘superhero movies’ are not even made to be B-pictures so there is nothing cute about this: it is just janky crap, looking as if it’s held together with witty glue, which given its carrying capacity the word is more charitable than it ought to be.

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