2 stars

I'm a huge fan of the actress Dakota Johnson, the "nepo baby" poster child daughter of actress Melanie Griffith and actor Don Johnson.

Not necessarily of her films, but she is an absolutely fearless interview subject, her very dry wit and brutal honesty giving the internet some of its finest moments.

When you've been around fame your whole life - her grandma is Tippi Hedren from Hitchcock's The Birds so it must have been inescapable - you must be a great reader of people and observer of character.

She's much better than the material she's often given, like the Fifty Shades of Grey films that made her famous in her own right, and she's definitely better than this Marvel Sony superhero film.

Madame Web is a character from Marvel Comics and this film production also involves Sony Pictures as they hold the rights to a handful of Marvel characters that include Spider-Man, and this film sits vaguely within that spidery world, though Spidey himself isn't a part of this narrative.

Johnson plays Cassie Webb, a paramedic saving the citizens of New York with her work pal Ben (Adam Scott).

Cassie gets caught inside a car after rescuing its trapped passenger, and she goes down with the car as it plunges off a bridge into the Hudson River.

When Cassie awakens, revived by her pal Ben, something else has also awoken within her.

At the opening of the film we met Cassie's mother Constance (Kerry Bishe), an arachnologist searching the Amazon jungle for a spider said to have uncharted healing abilities.

Having found the spider, Constance is double-crossed by her bodyguard Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim) who steals the creature and delivers a mortal wound to the scientist.

But our Cassie seems to have a little magical spider venom in her DNA because, newly revived, she starts seeing visions which she is slow to realise are actually her witnessing moments from her future.

Cassie begins to act on these premonitions, rescuing a trio of teenagers (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O'Connor) who old baddie Ezekiel is trying to kill.

A bunch of writers share screenwriting credits for this film, but Homer and Aeschylus are missing from the credits despite this just being a re-telling of the Cassandra myth, Cassie Webb being a modern version of the speaker of truth from the city of Troy.

Dakota Johnson gives Cassie's dialogue a wry delivery; she's quite relaxed in her approach to the character, which does work because you wouldn't want to be taking this stuff too seriously.

Look, I'm going to spoil something for you at this point, something that doesn't actually spoil any plot points from the film because it was not explained in any way in the film and the whole thing might have made so much more sense to me if I knew it going in.

I was wondering why the film is set in 2002, why so much attention was being paid to Adam Scott's Ben and why his pregnant sister, played by Emma Roberts, was similarly getting so much airtime when neither character seemed to contribute anything to Cassie's journey.

Scott is playing Ben Parker apparently, as in Peter Parker's Uncle Ben from Spider-Man, and that baby Emma Roberts is carrying around must therefore be the future Spider-Man.

Sorry Marvel geeks who probably all knew this, but I was really struggling to find much to connect with in what is another underwhelming superhero film.

Many, many films in, some would say too many, there're diminishing returns in the superhero genre and director SJ Clarkson continues a sad trend of recent such films where a promising set-up just falls completely apart in the film's final third.