#okayest movie since morbius

[thesparkwhowalks]

Just Saw Madame Web!

And you silly bastards made the mistake of following me so here come

Opinions

about what is easily the Okayest superhero movie I've seen in a while. I'm not going to bother writing around spoilers for a movie you're not going to pay American currency to watch anytime soon, so hit the jump.

OK, things I liked: - The premise of someone whose power is basically all spider-sense as a protagonist is actually really interesting and I overall liked how her powers are portrayed. - Time is spent genuinely developing the relationship between Madame Web and the girls. It feels earned when they're all super close at the end of the movie. - Dakota Johnson and Adam Scott infuse Madame Web and Ben Parker's friendship with some genuine chemistry. I'm sucker for a genuine platonic male/female best friendship, so I really appreciated it and wished there'd been more seen of it. - The film does a pretty good job portraying a murderous version of Spider-Man as terrifying. - Good foreshadowing with the fireworks warehouse. Infinitely superior to Itchy & Scratchy. - Madame Web's signature move is "crash through a wall and ram that fucker with a stolen car" and I buy that it works multiple times on Ezekiel because WHO DOES THAT?! - I liked Madame Web's disabling (imagine if I stopped the sentence here) not being portrayed as a fate worse than death or a karmic punishment or any of that rot. She's blind. She's in a wheelchair. She has a family and psychic powers and is happy. Things I didn't Not Like: - Madame Web and the Spider-Women become the Birds of Prey in the indeterminate future. It's a weird idea, but not without interesting potential. Things that annoyed me: - An ambiguously brown mercenary with spider powers. That are several characters from the comics that might fit that description (Tarantula, Black Tarantula, Devil-Spider) but not Ezekiel Sims. Always annoys me when comic book movies do that. - 11th hour ability to create psychic duplicates! Lazy. - Why must the blood/DNA/venom of creatures be the cure for genetic diseases in Sony spider-flicks? Are Madame Web and Morbius going to form a support group? - The film's "Web" mythos felt slapdash and poorly considered. Which is a little weird, because there's been plenty of weird Spider-Mysticism in the last 20 years of Spider-Man comics that makes a lot more sense than this. - The birth of the unnamed Peter Parker is totally unnecessary. - The whole Peru trip feels really unnecessary. More accurately, it is necessary for Cassandra Webb to investigate her past. It is considerably less necessary for her to do it Eat, Pray, Love style. Overall, I recommend streaming it when it comes to Netflix in like a month (or less, honestly). I am, however, a sucker for a connected-to-nothing superhero movie that clearly didn't cost $200 million (I grew up on 'em) and attractive women in belly shirts, short skirts, and low-rise jeans.