<PERSON>
The contrarian impulse to plant a flag for MADAME WEB is strong, but it'll take somebody braver—or more bored or more reckless—than me to give it a real try. There are passages and exchanges here which are, by any objective measure, absolutely terrible: cutting, framing, background, line readings, palpable ADR. These are flaws as opposed to being enjoyably relaxed ad/or off kilter choices smuggled through the studio quality control filter, which is one potential line of defence for anybody feeling protective of what feels like a broken production, and to an extent a parable of protectiveness (<PERSON> is a mama-bird figure) and an allegory of itself (the theme is trying to salvage the future and how hard that it is). Instead of repeating the obvious jokes about individual bits, I'll note something about the movie that I quite enjoyed, and which is neither unintentional nor "so-bad-it's-good," and that's the use of a TERMINATOR-style stalk-and-run plotline that solves one major, recurring problem of superhero movies, which is the basic invicibility of all involved, and keeps the stakes small and urgent. It cannot overstated how ridiculous the movie's villain, <PERSON>, is on a scene to scene, line to line basis—he walks through giant-ceilinged rooms in a suit and shoeless, looking like an evil <PERSON>Inarritu, voicing his every anxious thought and endlessly berating his one loyal employee, who is <PERSON> from GIRLS. 698
But there is something nightmarish about him using a combination of magic powers and circa Bush II surveillance tech to hunt down a group of vulnerable young women whose protector is basically helpless beyond a few flashes of intuition; it says something that I got caught up in the left-to-right-momentum of the story, which is more than I can say ftly, but I felt less drained). As for <PERSON>, she's fine: this is not a case of an expert comedienne making a meal of garbage or a movie star reduced to collateral damage, but another iteration of real, basic charisma that is rooted partially in seeming slightly out of it at all times. In other news: the soundtrack is more period evocative than Saltburn; the product placement is more shameless (and weaponized) than <PERSON>; the winky Marvel shtick is relatively underemphasized. Meanwhile, the climax is seriously goofy (I wonder if <PERSON> likes Raising Cain), while the coda hammers home the abject industrial failure of the whole thing by having our badly damaged yet sanguine heroine imagine future adventures with her intrepid, spider-powered harem— a vision made sadly ironic in the context of her new blindness. Those girl-bossy spin-offs will never be made, at least not in our time-line; more likely, MADAME WEB might end up as a throwaway joke in the next DEADPOOL sequel (maybe they're ADRing it in now), or a decent case study option in undergraduate cult cinema courses- one that doesn't really teach us anything while remaining a learning experience. 698