I figured I should check out the motion picture that everyone's talking about.......
MADAME WEB (2024):
Produced not by but "in association with" Marvel Studios, who I guess didn't give Columbia Pictures the memo about their own recent flop headlined by D-list female heroes, THE MARVELS. I'm gonna' frame this like I would in a lecture for the "Superhero Cinema" college course that I taught for about 3.5 years, through the lens of a lifelong comics reader who now struggles to keep up w/ the increasingly trivial programming of a post-ENDGAME Avengersverse... none of the four female protagonists in MADAME WEB are terribly (or at all) significant in comics or to most comic readers, and nor is the antagonist. The title character was a somewhat sinister minor superpowered
old woman introduced in 1980, who only stuck around for a couple years in subplots and bore a closer resemblance to O.G. Aunt May Rosemary Harris than to the lithe and youthful Dakota Johnson. Don and Melanie's daughter is braced by three teenager girls: the Latina (underwritten) is a newer character named "Silk" (though she's never referred as this onscreen) who had her own comic for a while a couple years ago; the redhead (also underdeveloped) was the second Spider-Woman for a bit in the late 80s and then much later took on the "Madame Web" name but remained more or less obscure; and the black girl (supremely annoying as written and played) is no one I've ever seen or heard of in a book. Meanwhile, the villain , "Ezekial", was the focus of a rather unpopular storyline in the 90s and hasn't been up to much (or has been dead) ever since. The absence of Jessica Drew, the original Spider-Woman who probably would have much higher recognition among mainstream filmgoers (or at least some) and wore a similar costume to Spider-Man's is puzzling... for that matter, Spider-Gwen is now super hot in comics and thanks to the SPIDERVERSE movies, so why not just make a movie about her?
All of the context above, plus the tangential appearances of Uncle Ben Parker, his sister-in-law Mary, and even (briefly) Peter as a newborn, stinks of drinkin' thinkin' or just plain desperation. Presumably someone envisioned this as a franchise that could run in tandem w/ more future live-action Spider-Man movies, as its set (otherwise pointlessly) in 2003, allowing the screenwriters to incorporate a Britney Spears song as if it was timely and also (I guess) allowing Dakota to be somewhat older (though probably still just a foxy 45 year old) when Spider-Man himself starts swingin'. Most bizarrely, Dakota's proteges never appear in costume EXCEPT in brief
FLASH-FORWARDS to....... a future entry in the franchise! (Always smart to lay a two-hour foundation for something that barely anyone is interested in seeing to begin with.)
To MADAME WEB's credit, there are actually multiple brief bursts of well-directed suspense and/or action, including a surprisingly effective use of that Britney song. Dakota is a more compelling lead than her mother, anyways; Zosia Mamet shows up for several scenes as a plot device, but I'm not complaining; and Adam Scott
delivers what is probably his least punchable performance to date, though of course he's no patch on either Martin Sheen nor Cliff Robertson. All those qualified kudos ultimately amount to little, however, in the face of one preposterously improbable plot contrivance after another hollow dialogic inanity. While it's shot and produced with some panache, you'd have to harken back to the pre-IRON MAN era to find another superhero film this poorly and senselessly written. In fact I was reasonably convinced that MADAME WEB was the first Avengersverse film scripted entirely by A.I., until the closing (and only) credits announce five count 'em FIVE human screenwriters. You know what, if this is what you get after paying five screenwriters to write a movie, maybe A.I. is the right way for studios to go...
Still, it was better than MORBIUS.
2/5
At the climactic moment when Johnson becomes "Madame Web", she is laying on blacktop next to a giant "210" in white paint....... baldly nerd-signaling towards the character's first appearance in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #210. I guess this is what 21st century Cinema has come to!