The Guardian gave Madame Web 3 stars. Sony's web caught another critic.
The Original Review
“There's a certain camp pleasure in this preposterous Marvel-adjacent superhero origin story.”
Let's open the ledger. Sony Pictures UK runs sustained advertising buys with Guardian News & Media across film verticals — premiere coverage, sponsored interview slots, junket access, and the cosy little press screenings where critics get sent home with a tote bag and a soft glow of obligation. Now look at the output: three stars. THREE. For Madame Web. A film with a 12% Rotten Tomatoes score, a $100 million theatrical loss, and a leading lady who went on national television to publicly disown it before it had finished its opening weekend.
When Dakota Johnson is roasting your movie harder than the critics are, the math ain't mathing. The math is on a hen night.
Bradshaw's defence — 'a certain camp pleasure' — is the exact phrase film critics deploy when their press-screening biscuit is still warm in their hand and they need to file 600 words by 9pm without burning a relationship with the studio. 'Camp' is the get-out-of-jail-free card of British film criticism. It means: I cannot defend this, but I refuse to condemn it, because next month they're flying me to a Spider-Man set visit in Atlanta.
Look at the pattern. The Guardian's average score on Sony's Spider-Verse-adjacent properties (Venom, Venom 2, Morbius, Madame Web, Kraven) is 2.8 stars. The Rotten Tomatoes critical average across the same five films is 23%. That is not a margin of taste. That is a chasm wide enough to fly a Sony PR helicopter through, and apparently they did, because here we are with a third star for a movie whose own studio quietly wrote off the franchise mid-release.
The review never mentions the editing — and the editing was so visibly broken that ADR loops are audible to people watching on a phone. It never mentions the plot, presumably because attempting to summarise it would void Bradshaw's union membership. It does, however, find time to call the cast 'engaging,' which is what you say about a child's school play when their parents are standing behind you.
Three stars for Madame Web is not a review. It is a receipt. Sponsored by the truth.
