Madame Web Review

Before Spiderman, there was Madame Web.

When three teenage girls are chased around New York by a man in a brown-black spider suit trying to murder them, they call him "ceiling guy" for never having seen a guy crawl up walls before. Ezekiel, aka "ceiling guy", has the power to see the future, and is haunted by visions of his own death at the hands of the now-teens, Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Anya (Isabel Merced) and Mattie (Celeste O'Connor). It is up to Clarissa Web (Dakota Johnson) aka Madame Web, a paramedic with clairvoyant abilities, to protect these girls. Along the way Web uncovers the story behind her own powers.

In this origin story adaptation, the old Madame of the comics is replaced by a spunky, if slightly clueless-looking, Cassie (Dakota Johnson). Cassie can see when really bad things about to happen - a traumatic superpower that seems more apt for an elderly woman in an attic than the bright young Clarissa. She "sees" her boss getting T-boned by a truck and dying, and then he does (she can't save him); and then she sees a pigeon splattering against a window and dying (she saves it). Her mother's field notes ("her mother died while she was researching spiders in the Amazon") hint at the origins of her abilities.

"Madame Web" is strictly average and infinitely corny, and never tries to be anything but. Webby visual metaphors lurk in every corner: If a glass window breaks, you can be sure its break pattern is a spider's web. If Cassie is watching TV, contemplating her newfound superpowers, you can be sure that it's a scene from A Christmas Carol with the ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. If somebody says at the start of the film "do not go into that building, it is rigged with explosives and has an unstable structure", you can be sure the explosives will go off and the structure will crumble by the end.

Too busy crafting corny lines like "when you take on the responsibility, great power will come" (a twist on the iconic Spiderman line), the writers ignore the story's villain altogether. Who is Ezekiel really? What evil world-domination plan is he hatching? We simply do not know. He lives in a glass-walled penthouse, with a mousy software engineer working on a facial-identification software to locate the teenagers. Like a cartoonish stalker, he chases the girls around, but it is no use with Cassie's visions predicting his moves. Cassie doesn't get much storytime either - just a hurried trip to a Peruvian rainforest to see the spiderpeople tribe, where she gets a crash course into her origins.

Dakota Johnson brings a sort of resigned "what the heck am I doing here" vibe to her performance, but you don't hate her for it. Nor do you hate how caricature-y Sydney and the other teenage characters are - the sweet one, the sassy one, the nerd. You are just happy these ladies got a bite out of the giant superhero franchise cookie, so they can make rent and go act in movies that actually require acting.

As a standalone movie, Madame Web is a weak, formulaic affair. But as a Spiderman spinoff, Madame Web drops some intriguing details about Peter Parker's origins (Cassie is at the baby shower of Peter Parker's mother). And in any case, that's the point of these B-list spinoffs, anyway - to keep the franchise's momentum going and the superhero genre relevant.