Madame Web villain Ezekiel is an aggressively evil storyline

Sony’s amazing Spider-Man universe film Madam Web There are a lot of questions left unanswered, some of which are completely practical (will we ever see all these young heroes actually get their powers and… become heroes?), and some of which are more like fandom debate fodder , which is so popular on Reddit . (Will there ever be a Spider-Man in this particular wing of the multiverse, or will Cassandra save Adam Scott’s Uncle Ben from senseless murder since he’s basically family?)

You could spend all day talking about the strange implications that Cassandra’s vision of the future has for the SSU, or debating whether this is the first story in history where someone who averts a prophecy doesn’t have that prophecy instead enabled. But those aren’t the questions that bothered me throughout the film. I got stuck on a more central plot point. How the hell did this happen? Madam WebDid the villain get rich?

[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for Madame Web’s plot setup.]

Madam WebIn the flashback prologue, the heroine’s mother, Constance (Kerry Bishé), is found where we expect her: researching spiders in the Amazon before she died. We actually see her die after being shot by the villain Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), who wants to steal the extremely rare spider she just discovered. As he tells her immediately after his sudden but inevitable betrayal, in a little villain speech that pretty much sums up everything we learn about the man, he has to steal it because it’s his only way out of poverty. He tells her self-righteously that he didn’t grow up with the same decisions as her.

When we next see Ezekiel, he’s living in a massive floor-to-ceiling penthouse in New York that offers breathtaking views of the city. He wears expensive suits and seduces beautiful women at the opera. His stolen spider lives in an elaborate, custom-made jungle habitat that’s more lush than half the apartments in Manhattan. He is clearly classified as a smug, evil millionaire The movies love to hate. But how did he turn spider ownership into a money problem?

I know this will seem like a tiny, irrelevant detail to many people. It’s hardly the biggest hole in a film that consists mostly of nonsense, sequel references, and random but prominent nods to 2003, like the building-sized mural that announces the release of Beyoncé’s film Dangerous in love. But it’s a more telling detail than it seems because it’s so fundamental to the story, and it’s a question the screenwriters can’t answer. who the hell Is Ezekiel Sims? What has he been doing for the last 25 years? What does he want out of life other than killing some girls he always dreams about? Does he even have an existence outside of his role as an often faceless threat?

How do you turn a single secret spider into a huge fortune?

The ridiculous thing is that there are possible answers – and each of those answers would say something interesting and worth knowing about our villain. The spider’s bite has given Ezekiel some of Spider-Man’s core powers: he can’t spin webs, but he can crawl along walls or ceilings, and he’s sturdy enough to stand up and shrug off two different instances in which he’s thrown off quickly being mowed down by moving vehicles, with no indication that he has sustained any permanent injury. There’s probably a way to convert spider powers into money, perhaps by becoming one famous, dashing jewel thief in the style of Cary Grantor simply by winning wrestling matches like Peter Parker does in many Spider-Man sagas after discovering his radioactive spider abilities.

Or it’s just as possible that Ezekiel somehow made money from the supposed disease-curing properties of spider venom. This is why Constance researched spiders in the Amazon before she even died, as there are legends about the healing properties of the venom. He may have become the world’s first spider-based pharmaceutical bro, distributing miracle cures in his secret single-spider factory in his penthouse.

Except… there’s no sign in this movie that he has the knowledge or connections to break into the pharmaceutical market, or that he radically changed the world by curing cancer with spider venom. If all he did was deliver spider bites to extremely rich people with otherwise incurable illnesses on their deathbeds, there would be many more super-powerful spider people.

How do you go from “I have a spider” to “I have millions of dollars”? It annoys me because it feels like a Underpants gnomes business plan This actually worked, no matter how ridiculous that sounds.

When in doubt about a comic book character’s backstory in a film, the usual answer is to look back at the source material. I asked our resident Polygon comics superfans who Ezekiel Sims really is and how he supposedly got rich by being able to climb walls. They basically said, “We don’t know.” “The comics are similarly vague!” Joshua told me.

Dive into Marvel’s database And Supervillain Fan Wikis didn’t help either. “He used his powers to found and develop a business” is as specific as it gets. I guess wall walking and having contact poison hands would be useful for corporate espionage and eliminating the competition.

But that still leaves the same questions: What is this guy doing? What interests him? What is he good at? What’s his deal? Judging by the way he treats his only agent, Amaria (GirlZosia Mamet, in a thankless role as “a woman who sits in front of many screens and delivers regular status reports”), has no soft business skills or vision, aside from the idea that when he shouts, “Get it now.” Results!” With his subordinates, they will suddenly overcome all their obstacles. I can certainly buy this guy as the head of a modern corporation. But the Creator of a?

I understand why the writers felt none of that mattered. In this film, Ezekiel is a one-dimensional villain whose goal is to threaten the slightly better realized main characters. His big story feature, aside from the fact that he’s basically the relentless pursuit monster of It follows, kills the heroine’s mother, which both sets the plot in motion and gives her the classic action hero excuse to kill him in return, or at least intentionally cause his death. (Which doesn’t quite explain why the story suggests that the film’s teenage superheroes would also have no problem murdering him in cold blood, but I guess that’s just a dream or averted future that never comes to pass. Assuming this one Movie Doesn’t Get Any (Continued.) It really seems like no one involved with the movie thought it needed more of an identity than “climb walls, be rich, hate the heroes.”

But what is the point of a supervillain who has no obvious abilities or connections to the real world, no meaningful personality or purpose, no thematic or symbolic weight? And who doesn’t seem particularly clever, clever or threatening? The The best supervillains are dark mirrors of their hero-nemesis, examples of how easily a hero can make a mistake. The most memorable villains are the ones with personality, flair, or at least a sense of menace. All of this requires some Sense of specificity, a sense of a goal, a plan, a cause, or at least a recognizable space in the world.

Instead, Ezekiel has a spider and money and a strange, hand-swept connection between them. Even by the arbitrary standards of mediocre current superhero films, that’s not much to hang a story on.