A tepid defense of Madame Web

It's not a good film but there are some bright spots

There are far worse superhero movies out there, and if you can brush aside (or at least tap down) the growing awareness of the confusion and unbelievably of the second half of Madame Web, there are good things here and there: the cast isn't bad and is certainly trying with a straight face to pull the carcass of the story (which appears to have been mangled by committee by the halfway mark, but that's just a guess) over the finish line. The film has moments that are good and are born out from the core story, its just not enough to overshadow the load of bad that is elsewhere in the tale.

The real issue here is one that has haunted films like Plan 9 from Outer Space to The Room, among others, which is the unintended laughs of screwed up storytelling and sequences that don't fit together, and acting that either isn't very good or is incredibly over-the-top, which doesn't really happen in Madame Web as far as the cast goes (the CGI is a different story) but when in the latter part of the film the girls are suddenly, and inexplicably, in superhero suits, its obviously inserted to justify the sequences put into the trailer trying to sell us that this is a bona fide Marvel superhero movie.

Madame Web really is of course a superhero movie, but it appears to have tried to veer toward an Unbreakable style of superhero understanding (which is certainly not justified based upon the source Madame Web comic book) and whatever the director S. J. Clarkson (and the script by Clarkson, Claire Parker, Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless) intended to accomplish gets washed away in the same old boring excesses that ruined the latter part of the bloated Quantumania film and plagued The Flash throughout.

All that said, the film is likeable as entertainment and will probably get a renewed audience appreciation at some point. The girls in the tale have a Scooby Doo kind of rough energy that keeps trying to bust its way out of the straight-jacket of dumb cinematic storytelling.

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Original page Feb 5, 2025