We interrupt our annual Oscar Quest for this breaking announcement:

“If you take on the responsibility, then will come great power.”

Is your mind blown yet? Your life irrevocably changed? Your latent Spider-powers activated? Your craving for scrambled Marvel Easter eggs whetted?

I’d already stifled a few giggle fits before Madame Web served up that hokum to its baffled, baffling headliner when she has her 376th consecutive moment of doubt. They’re so proud of this, it’s declared at least twice. Someone behind the camera thought that line was clever and/or sage — possibly director S.J. Clarkson (a veteran of Marvel’s ex-Netflix shows) or one of the other three credited writers, including the buddy-duo at fault for Morbius. This intentionally inverted callback to Spider-Man’s world-famous tagline took four writers to bang out. It’s a rejected fortune cookie in a film that already gave us actual fortune cookies in an earlier scene. Their fetch-level anti-catchphrase suffers doubly in comparison to the real things, and we suffer for sitting through it.

Sony’s latest installment in the MCU-Tangential Spider-Man Cinematic Pocket Dimension really, really hopes you loved the animated Spider-Verse so deeply that they’re eagerly bringing all their arachnid-based IPs to life in hopes of cashing in before superhero movies go the way of three-hour musicals and Blair Witch knockoffs. The overworked Spider-Verse teams skipped over most of the Spider-ladies in that thick catalog, choosing instead to create their own. The Madame Web team had their choice of leftovers, pushed aside Jessica Drew the O.G. Spider-Woman, and ran with four of her successors, none of whom would exist if she hadn’t been handed Peter Parker’s baton first.

I was 8 years old and had been collecting Amazing Spider-Man for a little over a year when Madame Web debuted at the end of 1980. As drawn, she was a blind, paraplegic, grumpy Aunt May lookalike who could foretell the future and warn Spidey when it suited her. 33 years later she gets an origin story no one requested. Here she’s played by Dakota Johnson from the 50 Shades trilogy (not my thing, but she was solid in The Lost Daughter) as the comic-bookishly named Cassandra Webb, a 30-year-old EMT and antisocial cat lady whose foster-home upbringing apparently left her traumatically awkward, as her interactions with other humans have all the warmth and panache of an 80-year-old great-grandma whose temper ruins every Thanksgiving.

It’s A.D. 2003 and Cassie works and mopes in a New York City that’s totally action-packed with WHIP-PANS! CRASH-ZOOMS! EXTREME SHAKY-CAM! SALAD-SHOOTER EDITING, TAKEN-STYLE! And that’s just in Queens! She’s surrounded by very few period-piece mementos and I only counted two (1) oblique allusions to 9/11, which I understand used to be kind of a big deal ’round there. Parks & Rec‘s Adam Scott is her work-husband Ben Parker, whose girlfriend is not Marisa Tomei but whose sister-in-law Mary (Emma Roberts from Unfabulous and Scream Queens) is eight months pregnant and complaining about the fetus’ jumpiness, implying: (a) the radioactive spider has bitten him sixteen years ahead of schedule; (b) prequel math is the real reason for the 2003 setting, which explains why Clarkson’s bare-minimum nostalgia-pandering feels perfunctory; and (c) NYC had a lot of Spider-superhumans before li’l Petey grew into the scene as just another Spider-poseur rather than the Spider-trailblazer.

As is wont to happen in superhero origin movies, a near-death trauma triggers newfound abilities in Cassie. First and foremost, she can spontaneously see ten to thirty seconds into the future. Stubborn denial wastes any and all net benefits she could’ve gotten from her first several premonitions, even after she has an Uncle Ben-style tragedy on her hands. (Not her pal Ben, mind you — he’s over a dozen years away from becoming that Uncle Ben.) The visions are mostly mishmash; comparing them to the Final Destination series would be an insult to the latter. By the end of the film she’s mastered her powers like Phil Connors in Groundhog Day, predicting and dodging every single obstacle, explosion, and chain-reaction spread pattern before they happen, despite a complete lack of training montage. But perhaps that’s jumping too far ahead here.

Before she can show or feel any real curiosity, a triptych of subway flashes presage the deaths of three teen girls, none of whom know each other but all of whom converge in one place because of The Web that connects everyone in their Earth’s reality through an unseen spider-dimension made entirely of plot-point coincidences. Cassie welcomes her younger costars Sydney Sweeney (Anyone But You, HBO’s Euphoria), Celeste O’Connor (Ghostbusters: Afterlife), and Isabela Merced (Dora and the Lost City of Gold, Transformers: The Last Knight) — one white, one Black, one Hispanic. The STEM geek with divorced parents, the streetwise rebel with rich absentee parents, and the hard-luck loner with a poor single faraway parent. These spunky latchkey kids will one day grow up to be Spider-Man spinoffs sharing a single Spider-Verse timeline, and they’ll all be 14-18 years older than Spider-Man himself if they live to see his debut.

That last clause might be a problem. Their convergence has been foreseen by one Ezekiel Sims (French actor Tahar Rahim from The Mauritanian and Napoleon), a former colleague of Cassie’s mom (Kerry Bishé from Halt and Catch Fire and Argo) who’s had powers for thirty years. He’s used them to become Dark Spider-Man, though he can’t proclaim Dark Spider-Man as his supervillain name because of course pre-Spidey is still a wee placenta-wader. Not only can Ezekiel secrete a lethal Spider-toxin by touch and change into costume in an eye-blink like the Flash, he also has precog powers like Cassie. For years he’s been haunted by a vision of being murdered by a trio of Spider-Women…this same trio of young ladies Cassie has now run into, none of whom has powers yet. He aims to kill them before they can kill him, thus thwarting the prophecy. Beyond that single nightmare, we never, ever see his precog powers again.

But Cassie foresees Ezekiel achieving his evil goal and intervenes. Her story becomes a 2003 Lifetime movie in which a headstrong woman must take innocent girls on the run from an abusive male whose lines have been weirdly dubbed with the sound-mix verisimilitude of a Gamera film. Young Jeane Dixon and three powerless Nickelodeon teens must outwit and evade a very powered Dark Spider-Man who’s had a 30-year head start on Spider-adventuring, who’s gifted with all of the Spider-quickness yet shows none of the Spider-reflexes. So it goes throughout the film as Our Heroines flee from the subway to the New Jersey woods to a motel overnighter to an incomprehensible grand finale inside and atop a Pepsi-Cola™ warehouse filled with fireworks (or possibly unused Navy munitions), for which there’s plenty of room because all the characters took turns chugging NYC’s entire Pepsi-product supply in previous scenes. The “best” part of that chaos is when Cassie uses corrugated sheet metal as a Captain America shield against fireworks that had previously punched holes through brick walls and blown a helicopter out of the sky. Fireworks, mind you, as we are verbally told.

Along the way Cassie, sans any offensive capabilities, struggles to find increasingly larger vehicles to run over Ezekiel with. At one point she flies an ambulance through a building’s second or maybe third story, mostly to look cool. A defibrillator is misused in a “cool” way that should’ve killed one or more cast members. They later flee to a diner that the girls reach by a half-mile walk but for Cassie becomes a harrowing five-mile drive from the same starting point. Naturally a set-piece breaks out, during which all the diner employees vanish, possibly on smoke breaks out back. When Cassie returns to the heavily damaged scene later, it’s abandoned and not even boarded up — just a single strand of crime-scene tape strung across a gaping hole-in-the-wall to keep out trespassers, bugs, and evidence-rinsing rain.

There’s an utterly hilarious scene in which she explains to her charges how the Spider-toxin can cause cardiac arrest, so she spends several minutes earnestly teaching CPR to them and to Viewers Like You, so that everyone will know how to apply this magical Spider-toxin cure, a very special message from the Marvel Heart Association. Granted, CPR does come in handy later, but Chekhov’s First Aid pays off for reasons wholly unrelated to Spider-toxin.

For an intermission, Cassie abandons the girls for a week-long trip to the Peruvian Amazon (put on her EMT MasterCard, one presumes) that encounters no complications or major delays with post-9/11 security at either airport, even though she’s a wanted person of interest making major headlines. But it’s important that she learn slightly more about the source of all these Spider-powers and accept the solemn advice that shall henceforth make her a better person: “If you take on the responsibility, then will come great power.” And with that, a grown Daria clone who couldn’t function as a lunchroom monitor learns how to be a maternal team leader literally overnight. She also sprouts a second whole superpower 100% irrelevant to the Arachnida class as we know it.

Anyone hoping Young Uncle Ben will contribute and display the sort of heroism that he’d one day inspire in his nephew can rest assured he’s a willing impromptu babysitter who asks not nearly enough questions, but may roll their eyes at the scene where this professional EMT’s brain checks out when a pregnant lady’s water breaks. (Did that really never come up on the job?)

Through a full two hours of actors half-heartedly trading stock interactions, it all just keeps going on like this, garnished with The CW/DC-tier visual effects that cost some $80 million because Sony didn’t bring a coupon. If MST3K riffing were taught in schools, Madame Web would be in the beginner curriculum. I haven’t seen a big-budget superhero flick this nitpickable since Superman IV, ranking even farther below X-Men: The Last Stand and Zack Snyder’s wood-duck shooting gallery for hecklers.

I didn’t expect Madame Web to be America’s next Wonder Woman or Black Widow or Ms. Marvel. Frankly, I set my expectations to absolute zero the very first time I read the phrase “Sony Announced Madame Web Will Be a Film”. But I also didn’t expect my least-worst takeaway to be a revised, fractionally mellower opinion of Morbius. That one was Blockbuster Tuesday-rental terrible, but compared to what went wrong here, it kindasorta did try, bless its flimsy heart.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Zosia Mamet (Girls, Mad Men) is Ezekiel’s Lady-in-the-Chair, guiding him remotely as she uses a stolen, early-adopter version of facial-recognition software to hunt for the three youngsters via all the cameras in town. Indianapolis native Mike Epps (The Hangover series, the Resident Evil series) is a generous coworker of Cassie and Ben’s. For a couple of scenes, Law & Order veteran Jill Hennessy is a pretty dumb NSA agent.

José María Yazpik (Narcos) is the leader of a Peruvian Amazon tribe who call themselves The Spiders, but in Spanish so it sounds exotic to uncultured audiences. Their Spider-power source begets Ezekiel’s and Cassie’s respective power sets and begs an awful lot of questions. It also raises an important point: at least the filmmakers didn’t bring up the Spider-Totems from the comics. If you don’t know what those are, don’t look them up. Believe it or not, this flick could’ve been even worse.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Madame Web end credits, and no sign of Venom, Morbius, or Michael Keaton’s displaced Vulture. Either no other Sony filmmakers wanted their future Spider-flicks connected to this one, or no one felt optimistic enough to act as if there’ll be more Sony Spider-films after 2024.

The end credits do reveal the VFX department curiously had more 2-D artists than 3-D artists, and that the climax’s score is more rousing than the rest of the film because they Xeroxed parts of John Debney’s final-battle music from I Know What You Did Last Summer. I presume this was a nod to some obscure South American spider with the ability to sample and reuse other spiders’ music.