Not unlike a burger at Arby’s or whatever KFC was doing with the Chizza, Madame Web is a quizzical aberration of capitalism. Of course, meme culture makes you morbidly curious. No, it’s probably not been prepared with sanitary methods in mind. Yes, it will make your tum-tum hurt.

Madame Web is the latest entry in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, or SSU. You know the MCU? The DCEU? This is that. For Sony’s Spider-Man movies. But they can only include Spider-Man proper now — as in, say, Spider-Man: No Way Home — when the MCU sphere is also involved. If that gives you a headache, the SSU was once known as the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters, or SPUMC. They pronounced it spum-see. Kind of like the C. diff that would inflame your colon after eating a promotional tie-in meal somewhere for Madame Web.

You may have read elsewhere that Madame Web is an objectively terrible but subjectively delightful slice of camp cinema — or a bad movie that mostly knows it’s bad, leans into said badness and achieves a level of entertainment in spite of itself. No. No, no, no, no, no. Madame Web is just bad. The SSU has camp. It’s called Venom. And it’s also called Venom: There Will Be Carnage. In those films, you’ll find outsized melodrama, exaggerated excess, bromantic chemistry and the endlessly delightful sight of Tom Hardy cooling his overheated genitals in a hoity-toity restaurant’s lobster tank. A third one is coming later this year. It should be fun.

Meanwhile, Madame Web instead offers the following: a lead performance from Dakota Johnson whose clear and charmless contempt can’t be cut around however exhaustive and nauseating the editorial efforts; three supporting performances from Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor that wouldn’t pass muster in the smallest of community theaters; a villain whose voice someone hated so much it has been largely overdubbed by a man who sounds quite ill and nothing like actor Tahar Rahim; and a by-committee screenplay that tiptoes around very specific Spider-Man references like “Uncle Ben,” “Peter Parker,” “Uncle Jonah” (LOL) and “With great power comes responsibility.” At least co-writers Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, returning from the shockingly preferable SSU entry Morbius, appeased the lawyers.

And in the SSU, those lawyers seem to be all that matter — from the ones who enforce Sony’s rights to non-Spider Man characters from Spider-Man comics to the ones assisting on the financials for Q1 2024. Madame Web is ultimately a bunch of names and numbers on a ledger — one likely to turn red, if there’s any justice left — and it musters a similarly exciting energy. It’s a meal like the one Brundlefly would consume in David Cronenberg’s The Fly, whittled down to goopy, enzymatic mush by vomitous acid.

There are at least a couple of interesting things about Madame Web. First are the panic switches seemingly pulled in post-production to align its 2003 setting with the birth of … well, let’s call him Petrus Parkus. You know, the character played by that very famous actor, Todd Netherlands? Very cute to believe anyone from this movie will ever play these characters again at all, let alone alongside an actor like Todd Netherlands. 

The second is the tension established among Johnson, Sweeney, Merced and O’Connor. Oh, it has nothing to do with their fright at becoming the prey of mean ol’ Ezekiel Sims (Rahim, if in appearance only), who prowls around New York like an evil Spider-M … sorry, Arachnid Male. Neither does it have to do with the concern about their prophesied or present-tense superpowers. Instead, it has everything to do with the optics of when to drop their representation for roping them into this debacle.

OK. Maybe that’s unfair to their reps.No one made them sign on for Madame Web. That’s what makes Johnson’s pissy press-tour persona even more puerile. She chose this. All right, maybe lines like “OK, so this guy’s hands somehow release an acute neurotoxin” or “But I don’t have a neuromuscular disorder!” weren’t in the original script. But her character was surely named Cassie Webb. In a movie called Madame Web. Which is adjacent to Spider-Man (but only adjacent … good job, lawyers). With mediocre source material comes modest expectations. Besides, doesn’t Johnson — among the most vapid, juiceless A-list performers there is — need to give more than one performance somewhere above average before something is truly below her?

Johnson’s good-faith effort begins and ends with the same-old pee-shiver face every actor makes when playing someone with precognitive abilities to see the future before it happens. That’s Cassie’s superpower, unlocked after the perpetually put-upon paramedic plunks her head on the windshield of a taxicab plummeting off a bridge. It’s kind of like a less gory Final Destination, a franchise whose finest sequence this film seems poised to reference. But no. That vehicle has a better 2003 Final Destination-ish film to appear in.

Anyway, the same peptides that will later propel the heroism of Petrus Parkus pump through Cassie’s blood, too, and her accident also unlocks long-dormant secrets about her mysterious birth. Of course, those secrets would be less dormant had Cassie browsed her dead mom’s treasure chest at any point in the 30 years of her life before this film takes place.

Sims has spidey sense, too. He’s got the moves like Parkus will one day have, but he’s also been cursed to see his eventual fate at the hands of Julia Cornwall (Sweeney), Anya Corazon (Merced) and Mattie Franklin (O’Connor). In 2003, they’re just teens who dance on a table at a diner to Britney Spears songs, as American diners were wont to let teens do back then. Later, they’ll become superheroes … if Cassie can keep them alive in a film that can hardly keep its sense of time, science or legal issues that would prevent a kidnapping suspect from peace-ing out to Peru (as a maniac with inexhaustible surveillance resources hunts her, no less).

Two years before YouTube debuted and four years before anyone had an iPhone, a subway rider watches horizontal video on a mobile device. Julia, Anya and Mattie leave a campfire burning to dance at that diner and wouldn’t you know it: Cassie does not return hours later to find a conflagration worthy of national news coverage. Budgeted at $80 million, Madame Web might be the most expensive CPR training video of all time. And it uproariously sends Cassie to Peru for a full week of self-discovery while Sims ostensibly continues to track the girls in New York using omniscient satellite powers. At least the pop-song soundtrack is chronologically sound. But with Madame Web, if you wake in the morning and you step outside and you take a deep breath and you get real high, you’ll still scream at the top of your lungs, “What’s goin’ on?”

Johnson will be fine after Madame Web. Sweeney will be fine. Adam Scott and Emma Roberts, who turn up for thankless paycheck roles, will be fine, too. Cry neither for Sazama and Sharpless, who are almost certainly on retainer for several more rounds of C-list Spidey-character scripts. Instead, feel the worst for director S.J. Clarkson — a 20-year-plus veteran of prestige TV who has seen several big-ticket projects come her way and never materialize, and who will almost certainly take undue blame here despite a keen visual knack for kinetic energy that gets lost in all the chopping. “The best part of the future is that it hasn’t happened yet,” says one character. There’s no real good spin on Madame Web, but that might be the best Clarkson can hope for.