sabcatt | dispatches from the AMC: Madame Web (Reply)

I saw Madame Web tonight. It was... bad. It was TREMENDOUSLY bad. It was barely even bad in a fun way. There were 5 people total in the audience, which makes sense for a showing of a bad movie at 9:20pm on a Friday evening (although the film itself, it turned out, didn't start until about 9:45, which. Yeesh.), but was still fewer than even I'd predicted (my number guess was seven PLUS me and my roommate).

I'm a little fascinated with the writing of the first half or so. The dialogue felt incredibly "real" (except when it was falling on its face trying to be medical- or scientific-sounding, ouch), but more in the sense of "this is how people actually talk" (which, as any decent author will tell you, is typically not how you want narrative dialogue to actually sound, because the way people actually talk is TERRIBLE for moving a story forward) than in the sense of creating believable characters that were intriguing. Whoever wrote the early Ben-Cassie scenes deserves a prize for naturalism but oh my god it did NOT belong in a fucking superhero movie, lol. If they ever figured out how to cut down and stylize, they could be right up there with Aaron Posner and like, I don't know, Jiehae Park, in contemporary theater, writing for the "let's do naturalism" crowd, but instead they're writing absolutely soulless and also just poorly-structured superhero movies that needed a better script editor AND video editor to even begin approaching "mediocre".

I loved their take on Ben Parker (sarcastic kind-of-an-asshole? yes please! that's a character that makes you go "I totally get where Spider-Man gets it from") but hated what they did to Mary Fitzpatrick Parker.

They did a fuck-awful job even working the precognition/overall-psychic superpowers into the narrative and a fuck-awful job at visually representing them. The villain was interesting only in how absurd literally everything he did was. Multiple scenes made me slightly dizzy and a few more made me want to roll my eyes out of my head because fifty million cuts is NOT a good way to indicate that a scene is frenetic OR that it's some weird psychic bullshit. I thought the relationship between Cassie and the girls was fun until they speedran their collective character development and made them One Happy Family at the end. The closing monologue (a thing I almost always hate, in both film and TV) made me want to start stabbing. The only redeeming feature of the ending is that they didn't include a mid- or post-credits scene.

I am informed that the acting was also really bad; I am (for a few reasons) not really capable of identifying "good" vs "bad" acting myself, unless it's REALLY egregious, so at least we can rest assured that the badness of this acting was not quite "self-conscious high schooler performing in a play for their mandatory arts credit"–level bad, but there were a couple of times even I noticed the line delivery was flat or affected as hell, so it must have come close.

I want my $15 back. I also might watch this movie again and write fanfic about it because there's so many elements that could be good, if only they had bothered to make them good.