MADAME WEB

New York paramedic Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson) gains clairvoyant powers after surviving a near death experience. Shortly thereafter, she begins having visions of 3 girls whom she's briefly had runins with before: Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced), and Mattie Franklin (Celeste O'Connor). In all of her visions they're all killed by Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), who has visions himself of his death at the hands of Cornwall, Corazon, and Franklin. His plan is to kill them before they have the opportunity to kill him. I went into this expecting the worst because Sony's Spider-Man Universe has now trained us to expect that; however, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this. I was hearing a lot of negative press going into it but I'm glad it's been better than most of what Sony has offered up to this point. The film does have its faults: the writers could have done a better job at explaining how exactly Cassie gains her powers during her brush with death. In addition, for two-thirds of the film, the only power Cassie has is seeing the future, meaning the rest of the time in order to save the girls from Ezekiel, she's literally just pushing them out of harms way and running away from him. I'm sure this won't do well financially at the box office nor will a sequel be green lit but it does give me some optimism heading into KRAVEN THE HUNTER later this year. 6/10