Madame Web has received an absolute pummeling from critics, but Hush director and Midnight Mass creator Mike Flanagan has his own hilarious review on Letterboxd.

His review is a word-for-word copy and paste of AMC's ad starring Nicole Kidman. And bear with me as I take a page out of his book and paste his review here:

“We come to this place… for magic. We come to the theater to laugh, to cry, to care. Because we need that, all of us: that indescribable feeling we get when the lights begin to dim, and we go somewhere we've never been before; not just entertained, but somehow reborn…. together. Dazzling images, on a huge silver screen. Sound that I can feel. Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this. Our heroes feel like the best part of us, and stories feel perfect and powerful. Because here… They are.”

And if you've ever seen the ad, you may have heard Kidman say those words in your head. I'm not sure if the copy+paste of the AMC ad is what Flanagan thinks is the effort Madame Web deserved, but the genius (at least to me) in his take isn't in the post, but the tags:

“responsibility, great power, dees spydur womyn, exposition to cats, convenient explosives, britney spears, facial recognition, murder visions, fireworks because, don't say peter parker, wait why is she blind, terrible nurses, adr, dubbing, no really, the adr”

Some of the tags are definitely jokes, but most touch on the movie's glaring issues. Let's start with fourth tag, “exposition to cats.” If you haven't seen the film, this references the scene where Cassie (Dakota Johnson) basically tells the cat what's going on. I'm never against talking to pets, but in the movie it just seemed like a cop out. Why tell the cat and not trust the audience to figure out the story? It's a movie; you're supposed to show and not rely on telling — even if it's to a cat.

Flanagan's second tag for “convenient explosives” refers to two fireworks explosion that don't seem to have much to do with keeping the plot moving but only serve as visual eye candy.

He also paid particular attention to one of the movie's biggest criticisms: its overuse of ADR and looping. In case you don't know, ADR stands for automated dialogue replacement. It's common practice to do ADR and/or looping for films to, according to Backstage, “improve audio quality, fill in wide shots, input dialogue and story changes and improve a performance.”

The problem is in Madame Web, it's so obviously poorly done. In some scenes, you can hear the voice of the character and yet the one on screen isn't moving their lips. At other times, there's a recorded line that doesn't seem to be necessary. These are just some of the production issues that Flanagan's tag of ADR will undoubtedly evoke even more scenes than I just listed.

He's not the first person to point these out. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film scored a lowly 13% out of 202 reviews so far. Many of the critics pointed out the same things that Flanagan tagged such as the ADR as well as the plot construction, what there was of it any way.

Others have called it lazy and seemed as if being a pseudo Spider-Man movie was the be-all, end-all of its existence. And due to that, there was no need to make an honest effort in the production. One reviewer said, “It dangles Spider-Man references at us like keys in front of a cat.”

While fans have expressed their disappointment, Madame Web still earned a 53% audience score. However, it begs the question: does that number only look good because the critics score is low?

The movie also has been, more than once and in various platforms, unfavorably compared to Morbius. In fact, the top liked review on Letterboxd said, “This makes Morbius look like The Godfather.” For reference, Morbius has a 15% critics score on RT.

However, what irks me more than all of the plot holes is what Flanagan tagged three times: audio issues. It seems like such an egregious mistake for a presumably big-budget movie. Any amateur filmmaker or even content creator will tell you that audio is more important than video. It sounds counterintuitive, but studies have shown that it is true.

It's also a bad sign that professionals and the mass viewing public agree on something that makes Madame Web bad. Most non-film people don't take note of technicalities, but in this case, Flanagan was definitely right to devote three tags to it.