Kieron Loughran
Last week Sony released their newest film, and it’s not a secret but it isn’t great.
The films budget was surprisingly a lot lower than a lot of other superhero films and Marvel films with an $80 million budget. However after 6 days it’s mare $25 million.
The film tries to tell the origin story of superhero Madame Web. A relatively unknown character which allows for creativity to come through and none of it does.
The films biggest flaw is the screenwriting, every character is extremely poorly written and the acting is very poor, not one character excels or even acts like they want to be in any scene. With Dakota Johnson the main protagonist giving an extremely poor performance.
The films goes wrong after about 6 minutes with an introduction to Cassie mother (Constance) in the Amazon jungle. In the jungle, Constance is with a group of people who are trying to find a rare spider to help cure her unborn child. This Spider has never been captained alive and it takes them a few mins to find and as soon as she does the Antagonist fires and kills 2 people and claims he wants the spider for himself. We never find out the reason for him doing this and he never explains he just does it, but he shoots and kills Constance but as he does this an Amazon tribe of ‘Spider people’ come down from the trees and try to help the pregnant lady but Constance gives birth and Madame Web is born. But the tribe let the villain get away. The next scene shows Cassie being all grown up in the early 2000s and how she got to New York is unknown and not mentioned. But she’s a paramedic with Ben Parker of all people and the two establish a ‘connection’ throughout. All of this is delivered in around 10 mins, and the dialogue sounds like plot points that haven’t been expanded on at all and very first drafty with little input.
Other problems comes with the villain. motivation. After we have been introduced to Madame Web we now meet Ezekiel Sims, and he has been having the same dream of him dying of being pushed out of his building by 3 girls dressed as Spiders. He tells this to a lover, whom he slept with and instead of trying to find out why they might be trying to kill him or anything more about it. So now his plan is to stalk every CCTV and surveillance in New York and wait to see the teenage girls and try to kill them so they won’t kill him. When the 3 girls meet up, it’s incredibly contrived with all 3 girls meeting at a train station at the same day, at the same time, getting on the same train, on the same carriage. It’s pretty unlikely that this would ever happen. And of course Ezekiel sees this on the CCTV camera so he now knows where they are. There’s alot of other important points throughout the film that happen and I will bring them up briefly. Madame Web can now see the future so can warn and impact the future based on decisions she makes. The villain is dressed like Spider-Man but he’s evil and goes roughly 6 police officers in the subway but he isn’t mentioned in any newspapers.
The girls all go to the woods and Cassie leaves them alone for 3 hours whilst knowing the evil Spider-Man is trying to find them so she can read a research book on Spiders that her mum made 20 years prior. it’s worth noting that the girls barely know her and are left here in the woods alone.
She finds out that her mum was in the Amazon Forrest in Peru, so she leaves the 2 girls in the company of Ben Parker and his girlfriend, May.
So for about 10 minutes our main character gets a taxi, goes to the airport flies to Peru, goes to the Amazon and instantly finds the hidden Amazon tribe. Who tell her everything she needs to know about her mum and then goes back home.
The other biggest point with this film, is the finale. The finale takes place at a Pepsi-Cola Firework factory. Evil Spider-Man has found them and Madame web gets a vision that a firework is going to come towards her and hit her. She gets the bright idea that if she can get evil Spider-Man to stand where she was standing, he will be hit instead. So the plan gets to work and evil Spider-Man hits the firework with his fist, into the air and blows up and destroys a police helicopter. It’s quite literally insane how powerful the film thinks fireworks are.
The film however is pretty funny but complexly on accident. The acting and story telling is poor and having Ben Parker play a strangely big role is so weird. But the film will make you laugh even if you don’t mean it. This probably makes the film a ‘so bad it’s good’ type movie.
(Source: Madame Web)