Expectations can be difficult. I mean, everybody knows that this is the worst movie ever made ever (to summarise the reviews and the general feeling on Twitter)… and should give me low expectations, right? Noooo! That means that I’m now betting on this being some kind of genius, future cult movie, because people are usually wrong.
So I’ve got unreasonably high expectations for this, which means that I’m going to be disappointed, and then hate the movie, and then agree with everybody else, which I don’t want, so I’m trying to lower my expectations.
Which I’ve failed at!
Let’s roll the movie and see what happens.
Oh man, these “zooms” done in post processing are brutal. And they do it all the time! To add some excitement, but it looks so bad…
I am actually enjoying this this far. It’s been pretty charming, and they’re good at establishing the characters. And look! It doesn’t look like total dog shit! It looks like they actually filmed this scene on location? Instead of greenscreening it like everybody else does?
Hey! It’s a real cat! OK, a location shoot and a real cat — this is already better than 95% of other super-hero movies.
OK, not all the shots look equally good.
Dakota Johnson is really good.
Such web symbolism.
That was probably half the budget.
This is funny!
(And pretty exciting.)
Why did they give the blond(e) one such an unsightly and huge wig? It’s really distracting… Wigs are a lost art form — back in the olden days, they knew how to make ones that looked good on people, but now they just order Maximum Hair Ever and drop it on some poor person’s head in a way that will cover most of the places the wig meets the skin.
Dakota Johnson’s also wearing a wig? If not, they’ve somehow perfected the art of making real hair look like a wig.
OK, I can see why people are saying that Johnson is sleepwalking through this — there’s certain scenes where she could have done a bit more than “I’m kinda bewildered, bemildred and bemused”?
OK, there’s a couple fight scenes that are pretty risible, but on the whole, this is fine. It’s neither a future cult classic, and it didn’t deserve all the ridicule it got. It’s entertaining! It’s a bit oddly paced? Somehow it feels both rushed and too slow? But it’s fine. I’ve seen heaps of super-hero movies that have been worse than this.
So grading this on a super-hero scale, we get:
Madame Web. S.J. Clarkson. 2024. ⚃
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