Madame Web: A Boring Disaster

Madame Web: A Boring Disaster

Madame Web is a bad movie. It is also one of the worst superhero movies ever made. But what makes it truly awful is something even harder to forgive it is boring. Deeply, painfully, almost impressively boring. Most people can forgive a bad movie. A boring and bad one? You are completely screwed.

I went into this with low expectations. I love Spider-Man he is one of my favourite comic book characters and the animated TV series introduced me to Madame Web. So despite the warning signs, there was a part of me that hoped this Sony spin-off could do something interesting with the character. Instead we get an origin story without Spider-Man, hinting at Spider-Women, stripping away everything that made the character compelling in the first place. To make matters worse, this is one of the rare female superhero movies. Which makes how badly they handled it all the more disappointing.

Reviews and rumours poured in before I watched it. None of them did justice to how big a sin this movie really is. Until I watched it myself I had no idea how much worse it could be. Maybe I am being harsh. But I do not think so.

The biggest problem is the boring. Yes I am going to keep saying boring because that is the only word that fits. I cannot even remember the plot. It feels less like a movie from 2024 and more like something from the early 2000s dated, dull, unimaginative and joyless. Not even so bad it is fun. Just bad and boring. It takes Madame Web, one of the more interesting and unusual characters in the Spider-Man universe, and makes her story completely forgettable.

As an origin story it is passable at best. The acting is poor, the script is poor, the special effects are poor, the action is poor. Everything is poor. And just to be clear this has nothing to do with it being centred on a female lead. It would be shockingly bad with a male lead too. The villain is as forgettable as the rest of the film. There are no real action sequences until the very end, which makes you wonder where exactly the budget went. My best guess is it went on the cast, who are barely used. It feels like an amateurish effort at filmmaking.

What is most frustrating is that there are ideas here. It could have been a psychological thriller something darker and more unusual in the superhero space. Instead it abandons those ideas and becomes a generic action movie that wastes everything it had going for it. The writers’ history does not inspire confidence either, which perhaps explains a lot.

I genuinely do not understand how this got greenlit or released. The test screenings must have been terrible. I hope so. Otherwise I have lost all faith in Hollywood entirely.

Madame Web’s great sin is being boring, with a terrible movie behind it.