You’ve got to feel a bit for Sony’s Spider-Man Universe. Preceded by the prestigious Columbia Pictures 100 logo, Madame Web serves up some of the hottest and rising names in Hollywood in a film led by four women. What could go wrong? Well, sometimes it’s all about the vision.

In 1973, pregnant researcher Constance Web is betrayed by her security, Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), who steals a fabled spider from the forests of Peru after shooting her team. With the help of the local tribespeople, Constance’s baby is born before she dies, with the promise that when the child needs answers, the Chief of Las Arañas will be waiting. 

Thirty years later, Cassie Web (Dakota Johnson) is a quirky paramedic in New York City who has trouble fitting in despite the efforts of her partner Ben Parker. A near-death experience leaves her with a distinct sense of deja vu, with events repeating themselves and slowly revealing a tangible future. On a train out of Grand Central Station, she encounters three young women (Sydney Sweeney’s Julia Cornwall, Celeste O’Connor’s Mattie Franklin and Isabela Merced’s Anya Corazón), all with a loose connection to her, and thanks to her premonitory vision, saves them from Sims, who has the agility, speed and wall-crawling ability of a spider. The four may well develop powers in future, but in the face of a well-connected killer out to get them, all they have to stay one step ahead is Cassie’s erratic visions.

It has to be said that for all its many faults, Madame Web gets a lot right. It’s a good-looking picture, presenting a fantastic primary-coloured New York, and a real attempt to reverse the usual rules of Spider-Man (more of that later). For those points alone, it’s streets beyond the simplistic and dire Morbius (2022), which will probably comfortably remain the worst entry in this shared universe. 

While that presented the central character as an antihero (very much the SSU thing), in the strained form of Jared Leto, this entry picks up on a relatively obscure, more heroic form of Cassandra Web. In the comics, she’s an elderly blind clairvoyant connected to a web life-support machine, so Dakota Johnson’s casting was a bit of a surprise. It’s made worse than that, playing up an awkward form of well-adjusted (looks, job, banter). She doesn’t so much as float around the film uninterested, but struggles with being wildly miscast. The same is true of her fellow spidees, although it doesn’t really matter so much that they are impressively unlikable.

In the hands of S. J. Clarkson, a hugely experienced director of British and American TV, with Succession, Ugly Betty and the co-creation of Mistresses on her CV, this female-led action-thriller should shine. But her feature debut never gets the heart racing.

It’s hard to pick on the cast, because the problem lies squarely with the story’s pace and structure, as much as with uninspired dialogue. There’s a lot going for inverting the idea of Spider-Man. Here, Sims is a dark-suited, homicidal crawler (not web-swinger), the undeniable bad guy. Cassie’s journey is all about gaining great power when she takes responsibility (geddit?). But Madame Web really undersells itself by keeping its leads underpowered for much of its runtime—Cassie’s three protegees don’t even develop them by the end. That makes it a slog of a long origin, and leaves you at the credits, with some gauche visuals, anticipating even more origin to come. The score even seems to give up halfway through, just burbling behind some odd action scenes (in one, the bad guy handily leaps into the path of a projectile ambulance). That’s when the scores left to do its things around some pointed needle-drops from female singers.

With a reduced Spider-Man as the villain and no one else with powers, Madame Web fails to spark up, even in the good idea of a climax in a condemned fireworks factory. It’s a shame, because Clarkson is clearly on board with the material. Broken glass and netting create constant webs at the edges of frames. Also, the idea of a villain leveraging a huge tech web to encircle his prey, all while characters like Ben Parker (a pretty wasted Adam Scott, but not as much as Emma Roberts’ Mary) hint at the future of a friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man. 

There’s a nice crux in Sims’ pursuit of the three women who he knows will one day kill him, and the inherent paradox that, thanks to Cassie’s powers, he creates them. But it’s lost in the jumble of chat about a curse triggered when he stole a jungle spider, the undercooked idea destiny is catching up with him, prolonged, if pretty vision CGI, and a resolution that’s really pleased with itself for undermining the promise of his demise. 

Mostly, Madame Web needed a better structure delivered by its many writers and the lone editor you have to feel for. As it’s centred on Cassie, there was the chance to use her emerging gift of clairvoyance to create a pacy, dark and compelling thriller of twists. Instead, a flat chronological take opens with a long and uninteresting prologue, half of which is later repeated for Cassie’s benefit when she meets her Obi-Wan. The speed never really picks up front here.

The puff is well and truly used up by the time Cassie emerges on screen in more familiar, presumably well aware of the years it’ll take Peter Parker to reach high school, and strangely smug when she delivers a final line to strike fear into anyone:

‘You know the best thing about the future? It hasn’t happened yet.”