Why Did I Do This Watch: Madame Web (2024)

the derp crew

Watched:  02/12/2025

Format:  Netflix

Viewing:  Second

Director:  SJ Clarkson

I swore I'd never watch Madame Web (2024) again, but I did.

A year on, it's horribleness has already reached mythic status in the superhero movie nerd community, and it's just growing in stature as Sony piles on Morbiuses and Kravens.  

I stand by every word of this lengthy discussion from last year.  

What I was trying to sort out was whether I just misunderstood the movie the first time, had I missed something?  Worse - was this just such a new take, and maybe a female-centric one I didn't get, that I was too hard on this movie?

But then I realized:  no.  This movie has the worst conceived characters in any studio movie I saw in 2024 or maybe the 2020's.  Hallmark's soft-smile small towners at Christmas are Ibsen in comparison.  These aren't characters, they're bullet points whose sparse dialog that should have been scene-work that somehow is on screen that doesn't advance the plot or inform us of anything. 

It has plot holes that scream to be filled, but aren't.

Our hero mopes her whole life about a mother she never knew, with no real discussion of how she grew up, how she thinks about this, or how it impacted her.  Or why it made her the Kristen Stewart performance that she is today.

Our villain's motivation is revealed to us - that the three teens will one day kill him.  But we're never told why, or why he won't change what he's doing.  Or if he's incapable of changing what he does. What has he built that he doesn't want to give up?  Why does he need to kill these girls this way at all?  Why why why why why?

Why are the girls treated like Huey, Dewey and Louie?  Somewhat different, but always in a line stating the same ideas?  Why did the movie make them so unlikable and largely indistinguishable?  Yes, they all have their family traumas they spell out in a hideously choreographed exposition dump as they plead with the 30-year-old woman to be mommy all of a sudden, which, honestly, just makes them worse.  I mean... if *any* of them got bumped off, would anyone watching feel *anything* other than "I wasn't expecting that"?

The movie's lowest point is everything that poor Sydney Sweeney has to do that is *not her fault*.  No one can do anything with "I am so trying to tell you my mom is in a psych ward, but no one is interested in me, so I keep hinting at something being wrong in my personal life even though we may be murdered as a group at any second."

Or, the two separate times Madame Web gets people killed by talking to them (Mike Epps and then the helicopter guys).  That was another pair of low points.

Or just running off to Peru mid-movie for an exposition dump.  That was insane.

Here's my theory...  it's likely wrong, but...  bear with me.

The original screenplay for this seems to have been done by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless.  They have sci-fi/ superheroey credentials with things that are not my jam, but fit into the mold in an awkward way.  They did Gods of Egypt, the Netflix Lost In Space show and Morbius.  But a third writer, Claire Parker, is listed.  And she's been on things with director SJ Clarkson.  

My suspicion is that they were very well-intentioned and decided to make the movie something *they* would want to see - it's a woman overcoming being Kristen Stewart and finding a family.  And, on paper, this is that.  But it also has that feel of 90's superhero movies where the movie-makers are so wishy washy in regards to the super-stuff, they decide "it's sci-fi, anything can happen, and doesn't need to make sense".  See:  Wonder Woman 1984.  

That *can* work, but you better be Grant Morrison.

Nobody stopped to think about whether this was actually, actively making Spider-Man more confusing and worse if he's born into a world with 4 women in spandex dressed in spider-themed costumes.  Nobody worried about how these three teens would get their powers - which is usually via trauma.  Nobody thought about "what would inspire young women, in particular these three boneheads, to go and fight crime as vigilantes even if they did get powers?"  

It's all so slapdash and, frankly, lazy.  There is always a chance for any idea to work, and in no way am I opposed to the movie this movie wishes it was - even if I prefer for my superhero films to have anyone being heroic or super.  

I don't know what was reshot.  Clearly every scene with our villain was reworked, and it's infamously ADR'd, usually his back is to the screen when he delivers any lines.  So what happened?   Why does this feel like the world's slowest moving trainwreck?  And if WB can shelve movies for a tax-break, why can't Sony?  You know Dakota Johnson would have been happier if they did.

Somewhere along the line, there was a script that made sense.  And then there was some point where a professional editor said "so... this is what you want, then?" and Sony said "absolutely".  And, it is worth noting it was SJ Clarkson and Claire Parker who produced this heap.  So.  

The movie basically fails at being a movie - of having plants and pay-offs.  Of being a story, if not a superhero story, of one where a group of people find common cause and friendship.  Because if that happens, it's off screen.  The moment the threat is over, two of the three girls should be going home.  The movie could easily have been about the one girl (I've seen this twice and if they say her name, I'm surprised) who is a Dreamer, maybe?  Or maybe a citizen?  That's a movie!  But we just throw some poor girl's shaky immigration status on the plot fire, and move on.  

The best we get for "now the girls are friends" is seeing them sharing a bowl of popcorn after a week of driving Adam Scott/ Uncle Ben insane, in a house with his pregnant sister.

How anyone feels or what is happening for that week?  Did they become friends, and if so, how?  In the words of Nate Bergatze as George Washington:  Nobody knows.

Is Uncle Ben in the future somehow involved with the girls?  Did Madame Web tell him he needs to die so Peter will be an awesome superhero?  MAYBE.  In fact:  PROBABLY.

It was really something to feel my life leave my body a second time during the entire diner sequence in which a 100 pound girl with two dinners in front of her gestures to the waitress and says "keep 'em coming".  What does that mean?  Keep WHAT coming?  Dinners?  You skipped lunch, you haven't been in the desert for 40 years.  And then they *dance* on the table?  Like strippers?  Why?  Who does this at a Denny's and doesn't get kicked out?   WHY IS ANY OF THIS IN A MOVIE?