It opens with a spider web, and a woman's fascination with its pattern. Starting in the jungles of Peru in 1973, Constance Webb (Kerry Bishe) is trying to find a rare spider with strange and special properties in its venom -- this despite being very pregnant.

Well, she finds it, and her bodyguard Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim) immediately kills her fellow scientists, shoots Constance and takes the spider for himself. Constance, dying, is rescued by mystical spider people who have Spider-Man-like powers, also gained from the rare spider's bite, and they try to save her -- unsuccessfully -- but do manage to save the baby and send her back to New York City, where she is put into foster care, grows up and becomes a cynical paramedic.

Flash forward to 2003. Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson, who apparently didn't really like making this movie) is partners with fellow EMT Ben Parker (Adam Scott). Yes, it's that Ben Parker, and we don't learn much about him in this movie except that he's met a really nice girl (presumably the future Aunt May) and his sister-in-law Mary is very pregnant.

On an emergency call, Cassandra very nearly drowns and abruptly gains precognitive powers. She suddenly realizes that three young women are in danger and -- although she doesn't really like teenagers or, you know, people in general -- sets out to save them from Ezekiel, who also lives in New York and also has precog abilities. Ezekiel knows those three girls will grow up to cause his death, so he dons his dark Spider-Man costume and sets out to kill them first.

Oh, the young women are Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced) and Mattie Franklin (Celeste O'Connor), all of whom have dead, absent or uncaring parents, and all of whom are destined to grow up and become Spider-Women. (Forget for the moment that, in the comics, they were inspired by Spider-Man, and in the movie Peter Parker hasn't even been born yet.)

There are some chase scenes and some fight scenes. None of them are very interesting.

The movie is slow-paced, dull and overly mystical. The original Spider-Man concept, in which his powers were derived from weird science, is discarded, and now we have magic spiders and secret tribes of spider-people to blame.

Much worse, the movie dilutes any uniqueness of Spider-Man in the Marvel Universe. Not only do a bunch of people have the same or similar powers, but he wasn't even the first. He wasn't the inspiration. He's an also-ran in his own universe.

Oh, and the villain's overdubbed dialogue is poorly done and quite distracting.

There are a couple of visually arresting scenes, but the story is a muddle and the characters reach the end of the film without achieving much growth or development. Like most of Sony's attempts to cash in on Marvel's successes, Madame Web is a disappointment.