The actress stars alongside Sydney Sweeney, Adam Scott, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor in this Marvel offering about a clairvoyant paramedic.

There’s something so demoralizing about lambasting another underwhelming Marvel offering. What is there left to really say about the disappointments and ocean-floor-level expectations created by the mining of this intellectual property? Every year, studio executives dig up minor characters, dress them in a fog of hype and leave moviegoers to debate, defend or discard the finished product. 

Madame Web opens with a prologue that does little to defend the movie from all the mocking. In this chapter, we meet Constance (Kerry Bishé), a scientist conducting field research in 1973 in the Peruvian jungle during the final month of her pregnancy. She’s accompanied by a furtive guide named Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim). “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died,” Cassie (Johnson) will say decades later during her own journey to figure out the past. After Constance and her team find a rare spider, a tragic turn of events leads to their death. Fortunately, her child survives. 

Early scenes lightly sketch Cassie’s life in New York. She grew up in foster care and keeps a suitcase of her mother’s photos, letters and old journals underneath her bed. She hardly makes plans, preferring to stay home with her cat. Johnson initially seems like a fine match for the role. Cassie has a droll sense of humor, and many of her lines land thanks to Johnson’s deadpan delivery. The actress is strongest when Cassie navigates socially awkward situations with a chaotic honesty; there’s a particularly funny scene in which she dampens the mood of a baby shower. But when the film requires Johnson to bump up the energy, the Fifty Shades actress stumbles.

After trying to save a man whose car flipped on the highway, Cassie falls into the East River. The near-death experience activates her clairvoyant powers and kicks off the intrigue of the film. Already misanthropic, Cassie now feels even more alienated from society. She walks through the world with heightened senses and nagging déjà-vu. Clarkson experiments a little here using slick effects and off-kilter angles to underscore Cassie’s changed worldview and state of unease. 

As Cassie adjusts to the new terms of her life, Ezekiel hunts for three teenage girls in the city. Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Anya Corazon (Isabel Merced) and Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor) don’t have anything in common until Cassie starts seeing visions of their death. Cassie doesn’t know why Ezekiel is after them, but she knows she must save them. The reluctant socializer becomes a den mother to three girls, who all realize they have been emotionally abandoned by people in their lives. Madame Web doesn’t capitalize on the affecting potential of this realization; most of these discoveries are relegated to corny exposition, and the girls never move beyond stock-character territory.