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Believe it or not, this movie is not as bad as you’ve heard — it’s worse.

I read Morbius was terrible, but I eventually streamed it, and you know what? I liked it! I avoided the Venom movies for years because I assumed they’d be bad, but guess what? After Morbius, I took a chance on them, and while the second one wasn’t very good, I really enjoyed the first one.

So I figured, hey, maybe Sony is on to something here after all.

I especially became interested in Madame Web when I saw a preview with Sydney Sweeny wearing the black and white Spider-Woman costume. I grew up in the ’80s and I distinctly remember that costume from the comic book series called Secret Wars. Furthermore, that same preview showed two other women in Spider-Woman costumes as well.

I thought, “Okay! If this movie is actually a backdoor method of bringing all kinds of Spider-Man heroes to life–I’m in!”

Let me save you the price of a ticket and spoil a movie that honestly doesn’t have much story going for it. The time the women spend in Spider-Woman garb is equal to about three minutes. It takes place in a future vision that never comes to pass. You saw everything there was to see in the preview. The rest of the movie is about a guy trying to kill them in present time, which is actually 2002 for them, so that they don’t kill him in the future.

Honestly, I knew this movie was going to be terrible within the first three minutes. From the get-go, the dialogue is truly, truly, truly stiff, expository, and generally unpleasant. Nothing and no one sounded natural in this film, despite some truly talented people.

Let’s get into that. Dakota Johnson always falls a little flat with me. I don’t find her terribly charismatic or captivating, but that’s just my opinion. She’s having a great career so I’m obviously in the minority on that one. Sydney Sweeny, however, tends to shine in everything she does, but she didn’t get much at all to do. She was teamed up with Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor as three teenagers in danger from a killer, and the three of them had terrific chemistry. Had the movie focused on them, with Madame Web as a supporting character rather than the headliner, the movie could have been totally different. They even could have called it Spider-Women. Adam Scott was severely wasted as Ben Parker (yes, THAT Ben Parker), and Emma Roberts played his sister, Mary Parker. We even got a cameo from Peter Parker as a newborn baby. At least, that’s what we were led to believe. Tahar Rahim played the evil Ezekiel Sims, and while he seemed like a good actor, the part did him no favors. Finally, even Zosia Mamet of Girls fame played a supporting role and was utterly underutilized.

How can a movie with so much true talent miss the mark so badly?

It’s simple–they did not understand their source material. Madame Web is an old lady in the comics and cartoons for a reason. She’s a minor character for a reason. One cannot simply take any character from any Spider-Man comic and turn it into an entertaining film. No one wants an origin story movie about Madame Web. Now, like I said earlier, a movie about a woman training and supporting a group of super powered teens with spider themes? I could get behind that idea. If they had simply made the movie about the future versions of the characters and flashed back to how they all came together, even that could have made a major difference.

Instead they started with a ridiculous premise in the Amazon, introduced a race of spider-people, gave the bad guy a costume extremely similar to Spider-Man’s, and essentially watered down everything that makes Spider-Man special. The three Spider-Women’s powers seemed very different from our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man’s–why not focus on them while maintaining Spider-Man’s exclusivity?

I could go on and on and on about Madame Web’s failings. There’s literally nothing redeeming to say about it, other than that the three Spider-Women looked super cool for the three minutes we saw them. Otherwise, the unilateral negative criticism aimed at this movie is actually fair, and this is from someone who wanted to like it.