With a frightening combination of poor acting, development and dialogue, “Madame Web,” with certainty, will be one of the most disappointing movies to come out this year. It currently stands at an embarrassingly low 13% on Rotten Tomatoes, landing it as one of the worst flops in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Loosely based off of the character from the comic book, Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson) was orphaned as a child, and became a paramedic who discovers she can see into the future after a near-death experience. Webb finds herself on the New York City subway where she sees a vision of three teenage girls, Julia, Anya and Mattie, (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor) being killed by Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim). 

Sims’ determination to kill these girls comes from the fact that he saw them in his dreams murdering him in the future. Webb doesn’t let the teens die on her watch, and basically kidnaps them from the train to partake in shenanigans all over New York City. Despite their differing personalities, they form their own unlikely family as each of them already has familial trauma.

Johnson gives a lifeless performance where she lacks any sort of emotion, presumably because her character is introverted. This is definitely an interesting choice from the director, S.J. Clarkson, as Webb is also a paramedic, a job that requires compassion and interpersonal skills which she seemingly does not possess based on the few, painful interactions she has with people actually her age. There is a chance that the director did not intend that, and Johnson just did not feel passionately about her role in this film as she said in an interview with Bustle. “I will probably never do anything like it again because I don’t make sense in that world,” Johnson said. “And I know that now.”

The three girls have similar difficulties with social skills and struggle to get along for a good portion of the movie. Two of them have very strong personalities, which results in several quarrels and leaves Julia to constantly mediate and try to resolve all conflicts. Don’t worry though, because all it takes for them to get along is to dance on a table together in front of some teenage boys and bond over their unfortunate home lives to realize that they aren’t so different after all. 

The dialogue, written by Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless and Claire Parker, is also severely disappointing, in part because of how unnatural and forced it felt, but also because nearly all of the villain’s lines were dubbed in post-production. While in the theater, I was actively questioning whether they even attempted to try to hide their laziness, as I could clearly tell his mouth was not saying the words that I was hearing.

Whenever I review something bad, I normally try to incorporate something that was good into it, so I don’t sound like a complete pessimist, but I couldn’t really find any redeeming qualities in this film. To describe it a little bit more vividly, if you could think of all of the features that make a movie good, “Madame Web” has none of them.

 Overall, this movie was terrible and just seemed like a poor attempt for Sony to make more money.