The day Madame Web comes to streaming will be one worth celebrating because while this superhero stinker is monstrously unworthy of seeing on the silver screen, at home it’ll be a perfect so-bad-it’s-good flick to watch on a cosy weekday evening.

Following a near-death experience while out on the job, New York paramedic Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson) realises that she can see into the near future. While experimenting with her newfound power, Cassandra is pulled into a deadly plot where a mysterious masked assassin is hunting three young women. Cassandra makes it her mission to protect the trio. If she is to be successful, she must have complete mastery of her power and discover the truth about her mother and lineage.

The Characters

For a superhero film, Madame Web is quite small in scale. The well-being and safety of three random women are all that’s at stake. This could’ve made Madame Web very refreshing in an age where city, planet or universe-sized threats are a constant in the superhero genre.

Unfortunately, Madame Web’s barebones premise cannot be considered a strength. The story is essentially that of your average Terminator sequel. The supervillain who stalks the three women is a man called Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), who like Cassandra can see into the future and knows that at some point the young trio will become superheroes and kill him. Needless to say, Ezekiel is the T-800 of the story while Cassandra is our Sarah Connor.

Now a Terminator plot told in the superhero genre could be interesting and there are moments in the film where you can see that potential manifest, albeit briefly. Whenever Ezekiel corners and confronts Cassandra and the trio, it’s tense. It could easily be a scene from a horror film. You know these civilians have no chance of defending themselves against this superhuman.

Alas, despite these glimmers of hope, the characters of Madame Web, like a lot of the film’s other elements, can be best described as ‘below standard.’

The women Cassandra befriends are basically strays. Their backgrounds are varied but all of their family ties range from being strained to non-existent. Having grown up in a foster home, Cassandra empathises with each of the women’s predicaments and over time begins to see them as more than just bodies to guard.

If you read that and thought it sounded like the most generic chemistry a group of characters could share on screen then you just got a good preview of Madame Web. I have genuinely struggled to come up with an impartial and constructive way of saying this but either due to a lack of originality or just incompetent writing, the cast of Madame Web is as two-dimensional as the images of them on the film’s poster.

With all this said, you may think that Madame Web is a boring watch or has nothing to offer as a piece of entertainment. Rest assured, it is not a boring watch and has more to offer as a piece of entertainment than your average superhero romp.

The Dialogue

Anyone who says that Morbius is a great so-bad-it’s-good film needs to watch Madame Web. Madame Webb makes Morbius look competent in comparison and I am not referring to the film’s dull cinematography or questionable CGI. The dialogue and performances in Madam Webb are at a Tommy Wiseau-level of awkwardness. It’s hard to believe that someone could write dialogue so clunky and wooden and believe an actor could recite it in a way that sounded natural. There are lines so bizarre but delivered with such conviction they’ll either make your jaw drop or die of laughter.

Do not pay to see this in cinemas. Don’t even rent it when it becomes available. Wait for a year or so when it appears on the streaming service you’re subscribed to, which will most likely be Netflix, and enjoy it then. Trust me, it’ll be worth the wait.

As a legitimate superhero film, Madame Web earns an abominable 2 out of 10 but as a newcomer to the so-bad-it’s-good subculture, it’s a solid 8.