Once upon a time, comic book movies used to be camp, riding the line of silliness and sincerity that would suit the cinematic adaptation of a slim illustrated volume about superheroes and their exploits. But over 20 years ago, the superhero industrial complex rejected camp, becoming dark and gritty, then sarcastic and flip, then cycling back to wholesomely earnest again for a time.

However, in these days of waning superhero enthusiasm, fatigue setting in, it seems there’s an opening for comic book movies to be stupid — stupidly fun — again, especially if “Madame Web” can tell their fortunes.

The ultra silly Sony Marvel movie perfectly fits the rubric Susan Songtag lays out in her famed essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” because, to borrow the phrase, “Madame Web” is a comic book movie “in quotation marks.” It is also the purest form of camp in that it is unintentionally so; certainly director and co-writer S.J. Clarkson didn’t intend for “Madame Web” to be as silly as it is.

But the most important element of the camp on display in “Madame Web” is the madame, Dakota Johnson, who has a preternatural ability to apply the aforementioned “quotation marks” to a line reading with the combination of her guileless blue eyes and a smirk on her lips.

Is “Madame Web” a good movie? No. Is it hilariously delightful? Often yes.

The film follows an obscure Marvel character who has the ability to see the future because she was bit by a poisonous spider in utero while her mom was researching spiders in the Amazon. The year is 2003, for some reason probably having to do with the age of a future Peter Parker, the other kid famously bit by a spider. Johnson plays Cassie Web, a FDNY paramedic in Queens, whose main personality trait is “mean to children.” They pin her social awkwardness on the fact that she grew up in foster care, after being born in a mystical grotto in Peru while her mother, Constance (Kerry Bishé), died in childbirth.

Constance was, of course, researching spiders in the Amazon as one does, before her security guard, Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim) turns on her, shooting the team of researchers and stealing the spider and its magical peptides. Heavily pregnant Constance is rescued by a team of Indigenous Peruvian “spider men” known as “Arañas,” but they can only save baby Cassie.

Ezekiel hoards the spider peptides for himself, and 30 years later, he’s now a sort of cursed dark Spider-Man, tormented by nightmares of being killed by a trio of spunky Spider-women.

It’s impossible to accurately describe the bad-good charms of “Madame Web,” an appreciation of which requires the kind of sensibility that celebrates the unnatural, the artificial, the exaggeratedly “off.”

Johnson gets it, and for those who also do, it’s kind of a thrill to get tangled in her web.

Movie details: Rated PG-13 for violence/action and language; 117 minutes. Grade: C

Dakota Johnson as Cassandra Webb in “Madame Web.”

Beth Dubber, Columbia Pictures