I almost admire the sheer lack of effort on display in the acting, storytelling, and set pieces. To say that Johnson in particular phoned this performance in would be an insult to Alexander Graham Bell. It doesn’t help that every other performance has a strange, stilted energy; even when everyone’s in the same room together, too many line readings feel like they’re being delivered with a Zoom delay. And to be pedantic for a moment, plenty of contemporary Spider-Man movies and spin-offs have been released in the years since 2003, when this film is set, and none mentions the good Madame or her coterie of female sidekicks. So how can the filmmakers pretend that all of this adds up to something audiences might care about? If it wasn’t already clear that superheroic cinematic universes are no longer an exciting idea, Johnson’s involvement feels like a half-hearted wave goodbye.