The Matt Walsh Show - Matt Walsh Reviews A Beloved Superhero Movie

00:00:00.000 He must have given up, thrown in the towel, abandoned his sad little masquerade.

00:00:07.020 I finally got to him. The power of the press triumphs.

00:00:11.200 Very rarely do I actually see these big blockbuster movies when they're in theaters.

00:00:14.840 And I did see this one. And I hate to be so predictable, but I have to tell you that I didn't like the movie.

00:00:20.100 It's his fire! Yes!

00:00:23.320 And it seems like everyone loves it. It's got like 105% of Rotten Tomatoes. Everyone loves the movie.

00:00:28.680 For me, the Spider-Man movie exemplifies everything that's wrong with superhero movies.

00:00:37.240 Get home, Spider-Man.

00:00:38.880 And first of all, just to run through some of the problems. There are no stakes.

00:00:42.860 I don't mean S-T-E-A-K-S. There's nothing at stake.

00:00:48.480 There's not a whiff of suspense or narrative tension with these movies.

00:00:52.740 Because every problem is solved with either miraculous technology or superpowers.

00:00:57.740 Or superpowers. And okay, that part I get. It's a superhero movie.

00:01:00.720 Or literal magic now.

00:01:02.340 Magic's real here too? I mean...

00:01:03.980 Shut up. 0.95

00:01:04.560 No, it's not real.

00:01:06.200 Shut up. 0.95

00:01:06.480 It's been a while since I've seen one of these.

00:01:07.700 And now, apparently now in the Marvel superhero universe, they have actual wizards

00:01:12.080 who can just fly in and snap their fingers and make everything okay.

00:01:16.840 So there's no limits. There's no rules within the universe itself.

00:01:22.820 And then so it's like watching someone play a video game with all the cheat codes.

00:01:26.860 There's no suspense to it. There's no point in watching it.

00:01:30.180 I'm fine, obviously, with the idea of a superhero movie or a science fiction movie

00:01:36.040 where things can happen in that world that can't happen in reality.

00:01:40.120 That makes sense. It's fiction.

00:01:41.280 But what you have to do, and this is just good writing, you set the rules for this universe

00:01:47.200 in the beginning. And the rules can be completely different from the rules in our universe.

00:01:51.380 That's fine. But then you have to obey those rules within the story.

00:01:55.140 Rules are meant to be broken!

00:01:56.540 Instead, in this movie, you could have a supervillain from a previous film.

00:02:00.180 And he took up multiple films. He was a big bad guy in previous films.

00:02:04.660 And in this one, he was turned good with a contraption that a kid whips together

00:02:09.980 in a lab at a scrap metal in three minutes.

00:02:12.380 I never explained how he did it, but okay, well, you could do that now.

00:02:14.820 And if that doesn't work, a wizard can fly in and brainwash the world.

00:02:19.020 And there are multiverses and time warps, and you can go back in time and forward in time.

00:02:23.440 I figured it out. Time travel.

00:02:26.240 All of that can be utilized if the narrative requires.

00:02:28.500 If the writers write their backs against the wall,

00:02:32.880 and they need to get out of a tough pinch,

00:02:35.140 well, you know, just go to a different universe, bring a wizard in, whatever you have to do.

00:02:38.900 And then you have, like, a superhero can stop a train or something with one hand in one scene.

00:02:44.920 But then in the next, he can be knocked unconscious with a simple punch to the head.

00:02:48.680 See, the rules are rewritten depending on what the writers need for each scene,

00:02:53.240 and it's lazy and boring.

00:02:54.560 It's fun for the kids, but it's bad filmmaking.

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00:03:56.300 Three days later.

00:03:57.820 You know, over the last couple of days, I've spoken about my experience watching the latest Spider-Man film.

00:04:03.060 I didn't like it, to say the least.

00:04:04.820 And during the comment section of the show, I have briefly made my case against it.

00:04:09.360 This conversation has provoked anger from the audience,

00:04:12.180 and even dissension within the ranks at the Daily Wire.

00:04:14.660 Here is my overall rating.

00:04:15.940 Second best Spider-Man film of all time after Into the Spider-Verse.

00:04:20.340 And I'm told by a source that when I was making fun of Spider-Man yesterday on the show,

00:04:23.800 the people in the control room were shaking their heads scornfully because they didn't approve of what I was saying.

00:04:30.000 Damn.

00:04:30.520 One thing you know about me is that when people get upset about something that I say,

00:04:34.780 that just encourages me to say it again, louder and longer.

00:04:38.000 I have, as you know, the maturity of a four-year-old, which means that I should actually be the target audience for Marvel movies,

00:04:44.340 but they still don't resonate with me because although I have the maturity of a toddler,

00:04:48.980 I still have the brain of an adult, which unfortunately precludes me from enjoying anything that Marvel has to offer.

00:04:55.220 And so today we're moving beyond just the latest Spider-Man movie,

00:04:58.080 and instead we're going to expand the scope of our inquiry and finally, once and for all, cancel Marvel itself.

00:05:06.080 All Marvel movies, they're all canceled.

00:05:08.620 Indeed, all superhero movies of all types are canceled.

00:05:11.180 I don't want to go. I don't want to go.

00:05:12.880 Spirit, please.

00:05:13.820 The first problem with superhero movies is that they're all exactly the same,

00:05:17.420 and they exist primarily to sell merchandise.

00:05:20.740 Introducing Action Command Spider-Man.

00:05:23.200 Now, superhero movies in the 90s were merely light on plot.

00:05:27.180 Superhero movies these days are entirely plotless.

00:05:30.120 Hey, watch your mouth.

00:05:31.100 And that's because of the advent of franchise filmmaking and world building,

00:05:35.160 and that's turned every movie into a setup for the next movie.

00:05:38.720 Nothing can ever really happen.

00:05:40.620 There can be no substantial progress, no final resolution,

00:05:44.240 because it's always just setting it up for the next one.

00:05:46.540 Each installment, none of these installments exist on their own.

00:05:50.280 None of them stand on their own.

00:05:51.620 They just exist because they've got to set up the next one,

00:05:54.600 and the next one, and the next one.

00:05:55.920 Now, don't get me wrong.

00:05:57.440 I don't hate superhero movies as a concept.

00:06:00.760 I have nothing against a fanciful tale about a man in a rubber suit fighting bad guys.

00:06:05.780 Bad guys who, through approximately 20 million story arcs,

00:06:09.460 still have not thought to simply walk up to their nemesis and shoot him directly in the face.

00:06:14.980 Now, I'm no expert on the mythology of Marvel or DC,

00:06:18.180 but I'm pretty sure a bullet to the face would dispatch almost all of the heroes in all of the universes.

00:06:24.280 It kind of tickles.

00:06:25.440 I know, except for Superman and a few others, but the rest, I mean, Spider-Man?

00:06:28.880 Just walk up to him and shoot him in the head. 0.89

00:06:31.680 But these are issues with story, and superhero movies don't exist to tell stories.

00:06:37.400 They exist to perpetuate a brand.

00:06:40.180 Now, when I talk about this, I'm often accused of taking the stories too seriously.

00:06:44.300 But that's exactly the problem.

00:06:45.520 I don't take them seriously because I can't.

00:06:48.000 I take them as seriously as I take like a Geico commercial.

00:06:50.880 If you have a secret identity, you need to keep it secret.

00:06:53.700 And the problem is that the writers don't take the story seriously either,

00:06:56.960 which is why they're at the point now of throwing everything into the mix just to keep the franchise going.

00:07:02.260 Superpowers, magic, miraculous technology.

00:07:05.400 Throw it all in.

00:07:06.420 Whatever is needed in each successive moment to propel it to the next moment.

00:07:10.520 And then at the end, you can erase everybody's memory and do it all over again in the next movie.

00:07:15.140 All of these Marvel script writers, they should be writing listicles for BuzzFeed.

00:07:19.360 But instead, they're making Marvel movies.

00:07:21.580 Because that's what the movies really are.

00:07:22.820 They're kind of just like clickbait content.

00:07:26.020 It's Marvel saying, well, here's two and a half hours.

00:07:29.820 You moron, sit down and have some of this.

00:07:32.600 That's why I don't just dislike these movies.

00:07:34.720 I reject them on principle.

00:07:36.060 I hate everything they stand for.

00:07:38.480 And I urge you to free yourself of their clutches.

00:07:41.860 I urge you to join me in saying to comic book movies,

00:07:45.840 you are canceled.

00:07:48.320 I am inevitable.

00:07:57.400 I went for that.

The Matt Walsh Show - July 07, 2023

Matt Walsh Reviews A Beloved Superhero Movie

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