Madame Web(2024)

We start off with an heavily pregnant woman deep in the Peruvian jungle looking for a very rare spider with her pal "Ezekiel" (Tahar Rahim). Guess what? Yep - she finds it, and almost immediately too! Anyway, it turns out that her pal isn't so friendly after all and pretty sharpish she is shot and face up in a pool of healing waters where her baby is being delivered by a jungle people with spidey-skills. Advance twenty-odd years and we meet paramedic "Cassie" (Dakota Johnson) who drives around with her partner "Ben" (Adam Scott), indifferently saving folks from disaster. It's one such disaster, though, that sees her tumbled deep into the river and having to be rescued by her buddy. This trauma appears to trigger something weird. She is getting flash-fronts. She can see the tiniest snippets of the future - and that doesn't usually bode well for anyone, including her! A trip on a train to a funeral proves decisive as three of the other passengers also feature in her dreams - all being the targets of a mysterious lycra-clad tunnel-climber bent on slaughter. Can she rescue them and find out just what's going on? Well possibly, but the story is just thin and the characters so undercooked that I didn't really care. The whole arachnid story line is under-developed to the point that I couldn't see what her skills really had to do with a spider at all. Tahar Rahim seemed uncertain if he was supposed to be "Deadpool" and/or Antonio Banderas and hats have to come off to Celeste O'Connor for playing the entirely obnoxious and attitudinal "Mattie" with quite such aplomb. The denouement is straight out of "Highlander" (1986) and I'm afraid that rather summed this up. Not an original bone in it's small and squidgy body, over-scripted and made for the sake of it. Sure, it's all about team bonding, trust and finding yourself (quite literally), but the readiness with which all concerned buy into this increasingly repetitive and whacky scenario is just daft. Like the whole multi-verse concept, the studios have decided to take super-hero films and flog them to death without worrying about concept, character or a decent story, and though Johnson does try to lift this where she can, it's ends up being something akin to one of those "Superman" television episodes we used to watch with Dean Cain - only with monotonous time-shifting!