 On Valentine's Day, 12 people rushed out to see their favorite new superhero on the big screen, Madam Webb. And I was one of those people. Cards on the table, this movie sucks hard, but not just because it wasted my time and money, but also my sanity. I recorded a 40-minute movie rant on this flick earlier in the day, some of the video got corrupted, and so now I have to reshoot 10 minutes of this thing. So thank you, Madam Webb. You continue to ruin my life. I do have a review on this movie already on the channel, but this is going to be a spoiler one. So if you want to keep those secrets intact, all the intricacies and nuance and easter eggs and smart, sharp, witty commentary, yeah, don't watch this. And also don't watch Madam Webb because none of that's in the film. All right, let's begin. If you wouldn't mind jumping in my fictitious car while I start it and drive over to the theater, you can experience what I experienced right with me. Here we go. We're at the movie theater. I'm running behind. Luckily, I'm a regal member because I only have access to shitty regal theaters. And so I know they have about 25 minutes of trailers before the movie even starts. Unfortunately for me, I'm running about 30 minutes late and bam, I get in there and I missed at least one minute of film, if not more. And I could only imagine how glorious that first minute was, really leaving a perfect impression of what's to come. Cassandra's mom is researching spiders in the Amazon when she's killed. That's pretty much a line from the trailer that's not even in the final product of the film. Ezekiel betrays her and he steals the spiders so he can have them to himself. This sequence is really going to set the tone. It's going to set the stage for all the fuggly looking effects and camera work we're going to be bearing witness to as these stupid tribe spider guys jump around from tree branches like this thing was animated in 1996. It looks atrociously bad. They're scaling up the trees. And the best part, nah, the worst best part about all of this, the director was just so proud of this awful shit that it's reused several more times during flashbacks and quick little clips. Cassandra Webb, the main character who's not in the movie yet, she's just a little fetus inside of this woman that was just killed or almost killed. She's bleeding out. Ezekiel runs away with the spiders and the spider keepers who I guess we're keeping a close eye on things but not close enough to stop this guy from killing her and stealing the spiders and getting away, they jump in, they grab the body, bring it to this cave of wonders from Aladdin and there's a little fountain of youth thing. They put her in the babbling brook, they put her in the water, a spider bites her tummy which gives the baby inside of her Cassandra special abilities, TBD. She doesn't have them at birth, she doesn't have them for the first like, you know, 35 years of life, she's gonna get them later when she's a paramedic. The way this film is shot, I use the word film very loosely, would have me believe they took about 30 stray cats, rounded them up, hooked cameras to their back and then let them run wild again while the director tries to herd them back to the main shooting studio. It is wild. This camera is flying all over the place and on top of that, there are effects just splashed on, spackled across the screen every five seconds. It cannot stand still, it cannot keep its cool. There's these overlay effects and these just like, orgasmic shots of webbing and just different disgusting CG splashed at you, it's miserable. But let's move on to the story. All right, we have our first responders here, the paramedics are going through the city, they're going through Queens and they almost hit a skateboarder at one point. This is important because this girl's gonna come into play later. Her first introduction is she's a bitch. She flips off the driver, she flips off Mrs. Webb and then she goes back to her high school friends. Keep in mind, we're gonna have three different high schoolers here we interact with. These girls, I think in real life, are all in their mid 20s, they're all like 26. So they're trying to dress them down and unsexify them. Sydney Sweeney's in this, they put her in the baggiest shit I've ever seen. It looks terrible. Why can't we not have sex appeal in movies? Especially movies that are so clearly garbage and going after the lowest common denominator from a script standpoint, from a story structure, just give us at least something to look at. You're not drawn women out to this film. They're not lining up in droves to see Madam Webb for some strong female leads. It's about time. No, they are not. It's a bunch of loser guys like myself going in the hopes that maybe Sony will learn a lesson and make something right for once. They won't. They won't. The mom dies. The movie jumps to 2003, which is present time for the film. So we're gonna get a lot of great nostalgic music just slapped on for no reason at all. And we have our first shot of our main protagonist Dakota Johnson absolutely stealing no scene that she's in because she can barely be bothered to show up at all. You could replace her with a plank of wood and I don't think we'd tell the difference. She gives nothing to the performance. Everything is monotone, no expression to her. Just a blank slate of a character ready to be sculpted into the Madam Webb. Kill me. Her partner in this film is played by Adam Scott. His name is what is it again? Ben. That's right. Ben Parker. Wait a second. Ben Parker. Uncle Ben? Ben. What? Yeah. Spiderman references. Nostalgia. I sure can't wait to see what they do with this reveal in the storyline. They're not going to do anything with it. The nostalgia gasm was for nothing. Instead, we're going to see how she gets her powers here, which is they're at the scene of an accident. Someone's tipped over in a vehicle. Cassandra slowly jogs over like life isn't really in the balance right now. She looks down. She gets in the vehicle and the thing falls off the side of the bridge. She hits her face into the windshield and it opens up some mystical part of her. She didn't know existed lying dormant this whole time waiting for her to smash her face into a windshield so it could be revealed. It's perfect. And now deja vu starts to kick in. We have ourselves a final destination scenario where Mrs. Webb can start seeing the future and how it's going to play out, but she has the ability to change that. It's, you know what? On paper, this isn't a bad idea. It's actually kind of a cool idea. It goes no further than that. We are then introduced to the villain of the picture. Ezekiel, this fucking guy, is so one-dimensional. His voice is so comically villainous. He says like, we got to find these girls and kill them before they kill me in the future. I know what my future is and I'm changing it. If you knew how you were going to die, would you allow it to happen or would you take steps to prevent it? I'm the bad guy. He is so one-dimensionally stupid and I'm pretty positive they voiced over every single line of dialogue he has. His lips barely move. And everything that comes out of his mouth doesn't match the slight facial tics that he's providing. It is such a weird thing. I've never witnessed this outside of a couple sequences in Die Hard 4, Live Free Die Hard, Justin Long, Bruce Willis. There are a couple scenes in that movie where they throw out a swear word but it's dubbed for PG-13. So instead of Justin Long going, shit, it's like shocks. It looks bad. But that's not throughout the entire movie. That's in one or two different scenes. Every time Ezekiel's on, this happens, bonkers weird. He's sleeping with some woman who he find out has access to a super secret 2003 technology that allows them to spy on everyone anywhere at any time. Another thing this has in common with Die Hard 4 actually is the hacking. They have a piece of equipment here that allows them to change the stoplight colors. It allows them to go into any camera, anywhere. It's got facial recognition technology and they just know how to use all of this because he has this woman at the computer who just kind of shows up later. No introduction to her. She's just there working out of his flat, out of his studio apartment and they're constantly filming her behind the computer shots and she's just going, all right, I see the women. I can find them. I'm tapping into this camera. Nothing to her at all. It's so ridiculous how she just comes out of nowhere. The whole plot of this movie is that Ezekiel, who's the bad guy from the beginning who has the spiders, he's got a little collection of them, he has Spider-Man powers kind of. He doesn't really ever shoot webs or seemingly have much super strength because he doesn't use it. All he can really do is jump high and climb on shit. So he has just a small amount of the Spider-Man abilities because they only had an $80 million budget and didn't know how to use that at all, I guess. I think the first X-Men movie has an $80 million budget way back in the early 2000s. What the fuck happened here? He's having this reoccurring nightmare where these three girls, these high schoolers, kill him in the future. There's Maddie, Julia, Anya, who cares, let's keep going. They grow up having super abilities in their own superhero outfits and they take this guy down. This is the only time in the entire two-hour movie we see them in their costumes. I shit you not. The posters with their costumes, the solo posters, the group photo shot, that's it. They're in this 30-second flashback dream sequence. Well, I guess it's a flash forward dream sequence in their outfits and then one shot at the end. The best part, the Madame Web uniform, that super power suit, is only shown one time at the final end credit shot where they're all standing there stoically. The rest of the film, maroon jacket, pair of jeans and an attitude that says I don't want to be here, which is something we have in common, Cassandra. I believe after the paramedic scene, Cassandra hangs out with Adam Scott for a while, they go to a barbecue at a friend's house. Emma Roberts is in this suddenly. I had no idea she was gonna be in this film, but it doesn't matter. I feel bad for legitimately anyone who signed on for this pile of shit, but also at the same time it's like if you knew it was Sony and part of their cinematic universe, you should be familiar with Morbius and the two Venom movies and know what you're getting in for. So it's kind of shame on you. Emma Roberts is having a baby. She's playing Mary Parker. Wait, if she's Mary Parker, then that means her son is... What? Spider-Man's in the house, baby. Well, not... I mean, he is a baby. He's an unborn baby. He's just a little fetus inside of her still. We'll see. We'll see what happens. Nothing. Nothing. We don't get any... And I don't think they even say his name is Peter Parker. It doesn't matter. None of this matters because this whole movie is a prequel. This whole movie is a build to a film we will never get. I should also point out that this entire sequence where Cassandra is hanging out at the barbecue, talking shop with some of the folks, going inside for a game of whatever baby shit they're doing, this has no purpose in the movie other than to really promote Pepsi products. Dakota Johnson awkwardly stands with the Pepsi, facing the camera, of course. It just wanders around the house, sits down, holds it in her hand. She never takes a drink of this. Ever. Probably because Dakota Johnson's like, in my contract, it says I don't have to drink anything with sugar in it. So I won't because my parents are wealthy mega stars and I don't have to work a day in my life. So if I'm going to work, I'm going to make it a total nightmare for anyone involved. Pepsi is going to be a prominent player throughout Madame Web. You're going to see billboards. You're going to see Popcans. It's all Pepsi all the time here. It really is Madame Pepsi at the end of the day. Pepsi Web. Your choice, of course. After the Pepsi shower, Cassandra at some point comes into contact with all the little teeny boppers and then we get our big first sequence, our big first action moment, where she's going to board a train home and she gets a foreshadow of these three girls dying. And so she eventually says, you know what, maybe this is something I should probably deal with. This is something I should tackle head on. And so she warns the girls they get off the bus just in time for Ezekiel's spider dude to come in and bust up shop. He's climbing on the walls. He's taking out cops. It all looks really mediocre at best and absolutely disgusting at worst. They get out of there, thankfully. And the pattern of this movie from now and going forward is going to be Cassandra sees a vision of the future and then she stops it by hitting Ezekiel with her car. That's how he's thwarted every single time. Ezekiel's coming. Hit him with a car. Ezekiel's coming. Hit him with an ambulance. Cassandra saves the girls. The cops somehow don't see the spider dude that beat the shit out of all of them and they blame Cassandra for it all. What? Okay, let's unpack this really quick. I know this movie doesn't care at all about story or it making any sense, but this is so ridiculous. They're down in a subway station. There would be cameras all over this place. There were several cops, not one or two. We're talking half a dozen, at least. Ezekiel takes them out. He's beating them up. And somehow they think this thin-ass 90-pound woman soaking wet is the one that dispatched all of these officers and then got away. No camera footage. Cops didn't see a thing, so they just assumed her. And now she is on the run. She's on the lam with these three teenagers and she has reportedly kidnapped them. Now, a logical person would say maybe just swing by the local authorities, maybe just swing by the police station and say, hey, yeah, I didn't kidnap them. All three of them are here. They're gonna, they're gonna attest that I didn't kidnap them. And we also have three witnesses and myself that say I did not beat up the cops. We're running away from someone. I would imagine that that could be something anyone could do. But she's gonna elect to instead take them into the middle of the woods and hide out and then leave them for several hours, hoping that they'll just stay put and trust her. And why wouldn't they trust her? They know so much about her. She's a crazy lady on a subway. She claims that she can see the future. She claims there's a creepy dude in the Spider-Man outfit stalking them. They have no reason to believe that they could be in cahoots and this could be some sort of elaborate sex slave operation where they're gonna smuggle these girls out of the country. Nah, why would they think that? This is much more plausible. Lady can see the future. Bad guy terminate her thing after them. So yeah, they're definitely gonna stick around in the woods while she leaves them. Why does she leave them? Oh, because she's gonna swing by the apartment and look through her mom's journal because she caught wind of some spider stuff and she knows her mom was in the spiders back in the Amazon where she abandoned her. Some crap. It doesn't matter. Bring the girls with. The girls are on her side. They trust her a little bit. They're not gonna leave. They're not gonna bail. We also find out these girls are all basically orphaned or have bad childhood homes. So they're kind of on the run as well or living on their own already. They could use a mom figure. But no, she's gonna keep them in the woods by themselves. They leave. At this point, the Suicide Squad, I'm sorry, Suicide Squad, not the Suicide Squad, the dumb one, the first one. Remember in that movie there would be random music just thrown in and didn't really match what was going on? That happens in Madam Web quite a bit. This is the scene that really sticks out. The girls are just walking through the woods, talking, doing nothing. And there's this background music. Let's get it started. I don't remember how the song goes. It's a good song. I got them past it. It makes no sense in the scene. It's just this poppy beat going while they're just talking to each other. But then we get to the two-day fours, the crown achievement of this film, the crescendo of the movie. They go to a local diner and Britney Spears' Toxic starts playing. That's all staying in. You're welcome. The girls get a little rowdy and they dance on top of a table as teenage girls do at local diners when someone's stalking them, trying to kill them. Madam Web thankfully shows up just in time right as Ezekiel gets there and hits him with a car. They take off, but not before Mad Dumb Web gets a bad touch from Ezekiel. Naughty. He is toxic. Literally. He touches you and you get some toxicity running through your body. Listen. System of a Down. I don't know how this works, but for some reason he only gives you a little toxic with the touch. He's got to hold on to you a little bit longer. So she has this running through her, but it means nothing. She'll occasionally scratch her arm or be like, ugh, stupid toxic stuff inside of me. And that's it. Nothing to overcome. She doesn't have to get rid of the poison or anything. It's just an inconvenience. Stupid. These four good-looking ladies head to a CD motel where they will hopefully get to know each other a little better. Maybe one thing leads to another. Pillow fight happens. Some kissing. Maybe some more. No, none of that happens. This is PG 13 garbage. They're just gonna tuck her in for the night while Madam Web sneaks out again. This woman loves to sneak out. She's gonna bail on him this time. No, she goes back to the cafe and that's where she meets Ezekiel. He's just there in spirit form talking to her, telling her all about, oh, he's not gonna stop and he's gonna kill them. And I don't know. I kind of zoned out at that point. I'm pretty sure I fell asleep for five minutes and then I woke up and she told the girls she has to leave them and go to the Amazon to learn the truth, learn the hysterosity of what went down. And these girls are like, okay, we'll see in a few days, bitch. Why does she not take them anywhere? How did she even get to the Amazon in such a quick amount of time? Where are they? They're in Queens. This isn't a cup of coffee road trip away. Whatever. She goes to the rainforest and of course knows exactly where to go somehow and the guy's there. He's just like eating a sandwich. Oh, you're here. Good, good. I've been sitting here just waiting for you for 35 years and you're here now. Good. Let me tell you everything. I could have gone to you. I could have probably stayed in touch over the years, but nah, I thought this would be better. I thought it would be better to just hang out for you to come here at some point in time. And so he tells her about his mom, how she actually loved her, and he makes her see how she can realize her true potential and she has powers she needs to unlock and she has an invisible touch, Phil Collins, where she can reach out to different minds in time and split her soul or something. He takes her to the edge of a rock and he says, do you trust me? Okay, Leonardo DiCaprio, Titanic, what are you fucking talking about? You've been with her for two minutes of screen time and now you're going to ask, do you trust me? And then she replies, I don't think I really have a choice. Sorry, I was doing way too much emoting there. Let's see if I can get into the Dakota Johnson. I don't think I have a choice. Better. That was better. He pushes her into the water. She sees a vision of her mom and how her mom really did care about her and she found out that she has a debilitating disease. I forgot what it was, but she went to the rainforest, she went to the Amazon to find a cure because she loves her daughter. That was the reason she went not because she hates and despises the baby growing in her, but she loves her. It was such a special touching moment for, I don't know for who, not for anyone with a pulse, not for anybody that was watching the movie, but somewhere, somehow it was a touching moment. Oh my God. Now we got to get to the, we got to get to the line. We got to get to the line. This is the part where the, the keeper of the secret spider society turns to her and says something. I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember, but I do remember this with great power comes great responsibility. Classic staple line from Spider-Man, Sam Raimi films. Fantastic. One of the most iconic lines in all comic book history. With great power comes great responsibility. In this movie, secret keeper goes, just remember that with responsibility comes great power. He like, he just flipped the words around. It's so stupid. It's so stupid. How do these people get jobs? How do these people get jobs? Look at IMDB for what this writer has worked on before this. Gods of Egypt, Dracula untold, some of the worst shit imaginable, pen to pad by this gentleman. And here he is again with Madame Webb, Madame Morbius, mad dumb Webb. She heads back to the city, which is just around the corner. It's just a little walk. It's a brisk jog, really. And thankfully she gets there in time to save the girls yet again. Because they're in harm's way. Mary Parker is pregnant. And Ben had just grabbed those girls to stay with him for a few days to keep them safe. But now all of them have to road trip it to the hospital. And at that moment Ezekiel is hunting them down. So he's stalking them, jumping on cars. It looks awful. It looks so bad. What is the budget for this movie? There's no way it was 80 million. There's no way. I've seen YouTube videos with far more craft. They're going down the city and this Madame Webb character, she goes, uh-uh, not in my town, gets in an ambulance, drives up a ramp and blows through the fucking building. She takes an ambulance through concrete. A concrete, mind you, parking garage, smashes through it, shot out of a cannon, into the vehicle, taking out Ezekiel, flipping the vehicle over. The girls are all fine, of course, not a scratch on them. They get up, start to run away again, get into another ambulance, take off, Ezekiel's in pursuit. And the ambulance is out of, out of energy, I guess. It's out of time. It's out of gas. It's out of something. So they get out of the vehicle and they run into a fireworks factory and this is going to be the final stand. X-Men the last stand. Ezekiel's in. Madame Webb and her, and her friends now, they're throwing little sparklers or fireworks that are blowing up and he's getting thrown around. It doesn't matter. They make their way to the top of the Pepsi building. I'm not even joking. They make their way up top underneath the giant Pepsi coliseum because this is Pepsi Webb and they have a final stand. That includes some really epic choreography such as Dakota Johnson picking up a piece of steel and blocking a couple fireballs. That's it. That's, that's the gist of it. The girls get bodied for a while. They go slamming into other things. Dakota unlocks her final achievement form, super saiyan dumb and she starts trying to help her friends by splitting up her whatever, something. It works at first, but unfortunately, Ezekiel's there. He knocks her into the water, fries her eyes or something, and she's dead, but she's not dead. Ezekiel's dead, I think. I don't remember how he died. It was so fast. It's like a two second thing where she did something and he fell off and he was like, into the fire and gone. Who cares? What really matters is that we had foreshadowing that was so obvious and so on the nose you, you could be five and still have guessed it was going to happen. When they were in the motel earlier in the picture, one scene takes place in that thing and that is Dakota Johnson, Cassandra Webb showing the three girls how to resuscitate someone if they're out of oxygen. So you just push on the chest and then you switch off when you're tired and they go through all three of these girls. This is probably about the time because you just see them going like this. This is probably about the time that guy in the theater got busted for jerking off. That's a true story that just happened recently. Anyway, after that scene, I thought, wow, I can't wait for this to come back again because that's how this dumb shit works and it does, believe it or not. Cassandra is not breathing. The girls fish her out of the water and they do it. They start doing the push-in. They start doing the, staying alive, staying alive. Subscribe for office references. I am getting a little ahead of myself. It was revealed that Ezekiel's nightmare-fueled dreams of dying by the three women was not a premonition. It was a misdirect because the real threat the whole time was Cassandra Webb. She's the one that was going to kill him. What? Then why were the premonitions there? Why do we see these girls in their super outfits? This is playing out like Cassandra wasn't going to intervene at all. That's what would have happened. But in order for the girls to get superhero powers, they have to team up with Cassandra Webb. It makes no sense. Now, there was something introduced to this. There was some power introduced when she found that fountain in the cave where she talked to her mom. She interacted with her mother from the past and her mom turned and they hugged and embraced. Very special magical moment for no one. And all I thought was, okay, there's something here that you could have used. Maybe Madame Webb is the one that implanted that idea into Ezekiel's head that these three women were going to kill him in the future. So he had to hunt them down, which began the chain reaction to get where they're at now where Madame Webb would kill him. It's still stupid, but it's better than nothing at all. It's better than just some random dream. Cassandra could have put that in there. Because she can go through time. She can go to the past and implant things. We saw her do it with her mom. It's so bad across the board. So bad. So dumb. We end the film with Parker being born. And for some reason, the camera really likes showing these little curtain shots that kind of look like webs. And that's it. That's the subtlety we're going with here. It's going to be Spider-Man. Look at the curtains. Look at the curtains! Madame Webb's now best friends with the three teenagers. They're all living together like a happy family. And now she's in Super Saiyan God mad damn mode because she can see everything that's going on right in front of her. She knows how to control her abilities. Oh, she's also in a wheelchair and has the dumbest fucking glasses on I've ever seen in my life. These giant idiotic looking glasses that cover half her face. And I would imagine her giving her the worst VR experience of her life. She's blind without them, but she can see better than ever. And that's where we end with her looking off into the sunset into the cityscape and picturing her girls growing up as different super powered spider ladies with Madame Webb at the top in her costume that you see on the poster. And that's the only time you ever see the costume or the other three really outside of that little that fever dream stuff. What an experience. What an absolute treasure chest full of goodies. Unreal that this movie got put out. I cannot for the life of me imagine something like Batgirl that was scrapped completely over at Warner Brothers was worse than this. This is an embarrassment. It's no wonder that Dakota Johnson fired her agent the day this trailer was released. What a rough time. I think I covered everything all the spoiler stuff. I apologize if I didn't. I'm a little confused as to why the spider bite gave Cassandra the ability to have foresight. See the future. I didn't know that was the thing spiders could do. She doesn't have super strength, speed, can't climb walls or anything else. She just has that foresight ability. But nothing really adds up in this film at all. And that's the bottom line. So there you have it, my spoiler review of Madame Webb. Really, really bad, really good stuff in the worst way possible. Let me know if you saw it. Leave a comment below. Please like and share the video around. I'm trying to grow the channel, get to 100,000 subscribers this year. It would be an amazing feat to accomplish for me. It's been a long time coming. Hope to see you around the channel as I post lots of movie content each and every week. And if you really like what I'm doing, there's a super thanks thing underneath the video. You just click on that and you say, hey, Adam, here's a dollar. Good job. Or, hey, here's $25. Great job. Or become a Patreon at patreon.com slash adam does movies and do a recurring little treat for me at $1 a month or $10 or whatever. The world is your oyster. It's really up to you at the end of the day. All right. Thank you for watching. And hopefully you stick around like a spider.