 This movie's terrible. How bad could this movie truly be? I didn't know I was watching a comedy. It's a cinematic trainwreck with the worst script of the year so far. There were drastic changes. And I'm hesitant to say it's the worst comic book movie ever, but it's up there. Madam Webb was the worst movie I've ever seen in my life. My brain is broken. What else to say about Madam Webb that's coming out Valentine's Day weekend? Yes, it is actually the worst superhero movie ever made. I would rather have plenty to get murdered. And I can't believe there's people here. Like, it's crazy. That was boring. I hate you, Sony. I hate you so much. The script was pretty good and I love them. Yeah. And they annoy me. Yeah. I know that when you see Madam Webb, you're going to love it. In fact, I think you're going to see it twice. Madam Webb, the standalone comic book movie about a clairvoyant paramedic saving the lives of three teenage girls. This movie comes from Sony, AKA the producers of the original Spider-Man trilogy starring Tomah Wire and movies like Venom and Morbius. This is the subsection of the comic books that Sony owns and can make movies on if it's not really affiliated or supposed to be affiliated with the MCU that's owned by Disney. Madam Webb has taken over practically every single platform for various reasons. This goes back all the way to when the movie was announced to the press tour of the actors all the way to the final outcome and result of the movie and kind of the buzz around this kind of stellar cast attached to such work. So I saw it. I took notes. I have pages of notes here. I literally went to a studio movie grill not sponsored obviously because why would they want someone to go in there and write physical notes while watching a movie in their establishment? I was eating my chicken tenders. I was writing notes. I really wanted to write notes while I was in there because I did not want to watch it again. I did not want to pay to watch it again if I forgot anything. And with that being said, we're going to be diving into everything, every nook and cranny of this movie. A short summary of the movie if you just the slightest chance haven't seen it the movie follows character Cassandra Webb in early 2000s in New York as she discovers her new found powers of predicting the future. Orphaned as a child, her mother supposedly died in childbirth which is not the actual case. She died because her nasty ass coworker shot her because she captured the superpower spider that was supposedly supposed to heal her baby's terminal illness. And then he shoots her and he's like, give me that spider. He shoots everyone there. He's like, I'm taking the spider home. And then when she's left for dead in the Peruvian Amazon, these people, these spider people come up from the trees, literally climbing down from the trees jumping around, they pick her up, they swoop her, they start swinging and they take her to a little cave of water. And as they say her baby with the natural spider bite, they make the spider bite her and then she gives birth to the baby and say baby, do you not see her sadly? And that's the reason why Cassandra Webb later has powers of predicting the future. And in her journey of seven powers, she assembles across three teenagers and she sees that they jump up and they murder the same man who shot her mother which is not the actual same man and she makes it her damn mission to save these three girls. At this point, if you're lost, you're lost. If you haven't seen the movie, I don't know what to tell you. We're jumping into characters. There's only like a few main characters that we have to follow throughout the story, but I want to talk about the three teenage girls first. We'll start with Maddie and Anya. In short, I didn't have much to say about these two characters. I have a little bit of a quipples with like, you know, their personality. Overall in a movie, they weren't the most enjoyable to watch. I wasn't like dying to get more scenes from them. Maddie's the wild one. She's like, she's a rebel. She's gonna give a fuck. She flips off paramedics. And Anya is like the straight edge, blunt one, very like straightforward with everything. Like I like math and numbers, which they're really forgettable characters in my opinion. I don't think that they have much to them. I think they try to claw at it. They really do claw to give them more, but there's just, it's, I'm sorry. There's very much nothing to say about them. Now talking about Julia, Julia is a very interesting case. And why I say that is because she is just as little depth as the other characters. There's something very distracting about her. She's a 14 year old girl. They're all supposed to be like 14, 15. Don't know if I believe that. She's a 14 year old girl who is like the unwanted stepdaughter of her dad's new family. All of the kids basically have no family. That's why Cassandra takes them in and is protecting them. But Julia is a very weird trope that they lean into. Like she is in this school girl outfit with glasses and a short skirt and knee high socks. And she's shy and bashful. And she's innocent and she's blushing at school boys. And following everything Cassie says and she holds on. She carries her on a teddy bear. And it's also like innocent and she's mocked for her innocence. And it's very odd to me, right? Each girl had their trope that they laid into. Wasn't really thought out. Wasn't lazily written, sure. But for some reason, they really put so much emphasis on Julia's innocence and her bashfulness and how scared she is. It felt like a very big disconnect from the other girls and not for the fact that they lay within different stereotypes of teenage girls. You have the backstory of their parents and then that's pretty much it. They fall into like tropes. And then Julia was very overly forced into a box and like overly like this is who she is. She's innocent, she's bashful and she's scared. Like make sure you don't forget that. Like she's shy and innocent. Like make sure you remember that. It was like being shoved in my face. And I was like, I get it. Like she is scared. Okay. The next character that I'm gonna be talking about is none other than Ezekiel. Name, just Ezekiel. He is cursed for stealing the spider from the Peruvian Amazon and is plagued with visions of his own oncoming death. He's a very subpar villain. And I think that like when going into the movie you kind of already expect that with like basically him being a non character basically in the comic books. From my comic book friends, what I have learned is that he's kind of just someone that comes in and tells Spider-Man like this has come and... In terms of execution of this villain, my very biggest issue with him is not the, you know, subpar-ness nature of his villain. How like he really wasn't anything special to me. How his motives were very lackluster. How he was just kind of like a guy. He, you know, he walked through New York city with no shoes on. Like he's just a gross guy. They dubbed so much of his dialogue. Maybe if you didn't notice it the first time you will for sure notice it the second time. So many of his lines are like ADR or dubbed, completely dubbed over. And they think because he's like turned the opposite way like I can't tell, but like his head movement is not even moving in the same rhythm of the voice that's coming out. And he just has the funkiest lines. Like they wrote such bizarre lines for him to say. Like when he kills like the agent to get like super like information or whatever he's like, I bet you didn't expect that today would be the day that you died. And like he doesn't even say it that good. Like he doesn't even say it as well as that. It's very monotone and it's very distracting. It's distracting because it's not only is it distracting tonage, it's obviously dubbed over. It's obviously like recorded so much later than when the movie actually was filmed. Like it is so bad that I could not help it every single time he came on. I was like, are you gonna say anything that's real? Are you gonna be honest with me? Are you gonna say anything like from your actual mouth? Are you gonna be speaking from your butt the whole time? Talking about our main character, Cassandra Webb, she, she's definitely a character. I would say that she, you know, she definitely is a character, you know. That could be debatable to many people. I find most of her most charming parts about her character to be very reminiscent of just Dakota Johnson. No, you don't have to know anything about anything at all. I think her off putting parts of her character have like a lot to do with like what type of trope they put her in. With little to explanation of why she's like that. We see her just being kind of a dick to everyone. She's super mean to Ben. She doesn't wanna go to Mary's baby shower. She's dreading being around a bunch of screaming women. And it's like never really explained. And I talk about this later on, but it does seem like this movie was given to someone as a final product. And whoever that person was said, you should cut that and move that and rearrange that without having any understanding of how character arcs work. Because it seems like we're missing a lot around Cassandra's character and the reason she acts like that is not fine. I was gonna say it's fine, but it's not fine. I would have left some like explanation and backstory of maybe her in the foster care system. Maybe her getting attached to somebody that she couldn't save while she was in the foster care system. A foster sibling and maybe they were injured and they couldn't get help, medical help and she couldn't save them. And now that it's her job, she doesn't want to get attached to the patients that she saves to keep herself protected. I would love to see if like, you know, maybe the baby shower was hard for her because she had a hard time within foster care. I don't wanna just have to assume every single part of her. It's a lazy, it's lazy. When I, lazy, boring, sloppy, floppy. And even the ending of her character, it's like she goes through this entire journey and it's just like, and she's just like fine with everything. Like she doesn't like, I just wish she had more. Even if she was mean, even if she was like upset, I just wish there was something more to her character. I just feel like I'm left wanting to fill in the gaps so deeply with her character. It just feels like such a throwaway character. And I do think like Madam Webb is an interesting character and I do think that they could have done a lot with it. I think that basically since Madam Webb is this like almost blank slate that you have from the comic books of her origin story, you can go so many different ways with it. That's why it was so disappointed with this. There were such little tweaks that they could have done to her character through the movie to make it so much more palatable. I do believe that they did. I think that someone cut them out. It seems like this movie was chopped three separate ways by three separate people and like thrown into a box, shook up and they took out the pieces and were like, this must be the order. Like Sony, where's the full cut? Release the full cut of Madam Webb, please. Cause I know there's things that are missing that would have changed it all. Madam Webb's whole shtick is that like a lot of her fighting abilities don't come from her powers, right? When she goes to the Peruvian Amazon and talks to the man that is like, I was there when you were born. He's like, you didn't get any of the like fighting abilities that Ezekiel got from the spider bite. You got the ability to ascend basically. You got the ability to ascend your body. He like fucking Dr. Strange kicks her ass into the water and like drowns her. And she like has all of these flashbacks and visits her mom and finds out that, you know she was diagnosed with a terminal illness before she was even born. And that's why her mom goes to the Peruvian Amazon to find the spider, even though it was very dangerous for her to be traveling that pregnant in the vision. She's like, you did it. You did it, mom. You did it. My favorite line that she ever says is when her mom is in the forest and like she just like looks at her like in the flashback and she goes, why did you hate me? It's like, was I supposed to know that she thought her mom hated her this entire time? They made her say that like I had known that she thought her mom hated her. I never thought for a second that she was like, I hate this fucking baby. I'm gonna go travel so that I don't have to deal with the baby. And the way that she said that like, why did you hate me, mom? Like made it seem like she gave up her baby like and that like she traveled like and want no part with this baby. It was just so weird. And with this scene in Peru, the man says an O to the with great power comes great responsibility. In most Spider-Man adaptations, they tweak this a little bit. So they take the quote and they tweak it a little bit for every adaptation. And in this one, it is when you take responsibility, you will gain powerful abilities. It doesn't even make sense. When you take responsibility, so like say if I took responsibility for something I'd done, I will gain a powerful abilities. I feel like that does not imply the same thing that with great power comes great responsibility. I feel like that does not mean the same thing. If you were just gonna twist and turn that whole thing upside down and do the hokey pokey, like you don't need to add it. It's fine. I could have gone without it. Like it really doesn't make that big of a difference. Like I honestly was probably gonna forget anyways, but I don't know, very odd thing to add in there. It just moving back to her finally using her abilities that she learned when, you know, she took responsibility and she gained powerful abilities. Now using these abilities, she basically in this whole chase sequence, they're chasing each other through this like fire work factory of some sort. I have no idea what the hell it is. And they're lighting it and they're trying to distract them by like, you know, lighting up all the fireworks and they climb to the roof and they call a helicopter to come get them before they even go to the roof. Okay, whatever. Sure, that's a plan. She ends up in a predicament. She ends up in a pickle. All three girls hanging off the roof. All that's a fall. Ziko's like, hey, you can only save one. And she's like, that's what you think. And she like ascends into like three separate beings and is able to help each girl and be like, I'm here, I've got you, don't worry. And she pulls them up. He kind of just like lets her do this. He like, it's kind of just like watching her and it's like, oh, okay, queen. Like he basically just watches her do this. He doesn't do anything while she's doing this. He just is like, oh, she's like ascending. Cool, like she's just doctor-stranging out. Like she can just like be in multiple places at once. Like that's really cool. Like he could have just like pushed her. He could have run up and pushed her while she was doing this. The way he dies is so stupid. She's having flashes of the sign above them. And she's like, the sign, the P. She keeps looking at the P. And I don't, I honestly forget how it even happens. But basically Ezekiel dies by the Pepsi P falling onto him. He is impounded by the Pepsi-Cola light up letter P. That's how the big bad future predicting super human climbing on walls, spider human dies from the Pepsi-Cola P. The Pepsi-Cola P. Boring, sloppy, lazy. Did Pepsi put somewhere in their contract that they had to be the biggest super hero at the end of the day? And in the ending scene of this movie, it follows, you know, Cassie falls into the water and the girls use the CPR that Cassie had told them earlier on in the movie, how to do. And they, you know, resuscitate her. And since she was, I guess, in the water with the explosives, she goes blind. And then like Cassie just takes all these kids blind. She can't walk and she takes all of them and they start living with her. And we end off this movie with Cassie like turning to her girls. She's like moving through the house and she's like, bless you, Anya. And Anya's like, what do you mean? And then she sneezes. And then Cassie's like, ha ha. Like think of the descriptive words of like cheeky grin. Like that's what Cassie gives, just like a, ha ha. The best thing about the future is that it hasn't happened yet. If I could describe this movie with like an all-encompassing like word, it would be apathy. I think that like every character feels so apathetic towards what is going on. Like apathy towards everything, apathy towards, you know, the risk of it all, apathy towards, you know, each other's characters, apathy towards the world. It just feels very empty, very bland. No one's that stressed about what's going on. They're saying the right words that are like conveying that they're stressed. Oh my God, I can't believe this has happened. Oh my God, this is so freaky. Oh my God, that crazy ass man is trying to get us. I just don't feel it. Like they're saying all the words that would imply that they're stressed and I don't feel it at all. Like if it wasn't such a buzz around the movie, I don't think I would really be talking about it. Like or even having the need to dive deeper into it. So glad I did. I love diving deeper into movies, even ones that I feel like very indifferent about. But I don't think if there was this much buzz around it that I would continue to delve deeper into it and why I didn't like it. I think I would very much forget about this movie if it wasn't for everything that was happening around it. So the last thing I wanna talk about is actually like the production and the press tour and a little bit of behind the scenes about this movie. Kind of what has been stirring in the media lately that is not just about the execution of the film itself but kind of a little bit more on the business side of things. And one of the most popular movie reviews and discussions that had around this was actually Chris Stuckman's YouTube review, which wasn't a review. It was him criticizing Sony and the acknowledgement of creatives not having full control to be creative and corporate sides of things and how that affects the outcome of projects. It felt like something was completely written out and then you just kind of took parts of it like throughout. I just like chopped it up. I just took a bunch of parts from every 15 minutes and then I spliced them all back together and I said, here you go. It's still a movie. There's still a first, second and third act. So like you can watch it. But there's so much substance missing because someone decided to cut out a lot of the script that I think needed to be there. Because in short, what I do wanna say is that this movie is like if you fed every single line that Madam Webb had said in the comic book series and the description of Madam Webb's character and you fed it into AI and like asked it to make a movie script. Like that's what it seems like. And I'm honestly scared that that might be the truth with everything that surrounds AI within creative spaces. I think Sony at the end of the day has the biggest issue because if you have three popular movies that are colossal flops that come from your studio, I think it might be you. I think it might be like you might be the problem. If you have three examples of people like having the most fun time ever, like laughing at you, pointing and laughing at your movies, I think you might be the fucking problem. And like maybe it's time to like self reflect for a bit. Overall, my thoughts on this movie kinda lean with the masses. I didn't like it. I wouldn't watch it again with payment. I would watch it again if you just put it on. Not only will it age poorly in a few months from now, I think it's gonna age poorly years from now or in the most happy ending ever, this becomes like a camp classic movie and five years down the line, it's going to be like a Madame Web Renaissance and everyone's gonna be loving Madame Web. Best case scenario is that. Would love to know your thoughts about this movie. Let me know what you thought about it. I think it was like a fun watch. Like I think it'd be like fun to watch and like play a drinking game out of. You know, like drink every single time Dakota Johnson's banks like don't move even though they're like underwater. Like I'd be drunk in two seconds. Okay. Bye.