Madame Web’s villain is the kind of plot hole I can’t shake

Sony’s mind-blowing Spider-Man Universe movie Mrs. Web leaves a lot of questions, some of them completely practical (will we ever see all these young heroes actually gain their powers and become… heroes?) and some of them much more the kind of fandom debate squad fodder beloved 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 a senseless murder, since he’s basically family?)

You could talk all day about the strange implications Cassandra’s vision of the future has for the SSU, or discuss whether this is the first story in history where someone acting to avert a prophecy doesn’t just enable that prophecy. But those are not the questions that occupied me throughout the film. I was stuck on a more central plot point. How the heck did it Mrs. Web‘s villain got rich?

(Ed. remark: Spoilers ahead for Mrs. Web‘s plot setup.)

Mrs. Web‘s flashback prologue finds the heroine’s mother, Constance (Kerry Bishé), where we expect her to be: researching spiders in the Amazon before she died. We essentially 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 sums up pretty much everything we learn about the man, he has to steal it because it’s his only way out of poverty. He didn’t grow up with the same choices as her, he tells her smugly.

The next time we see Ezekiel, he lives in a huge penthouse in New York, completely floor to ceiling and with surprising views of the city. He wears expensive suits and seduces beautiful women at the opera. His stolen spider lives in an elaborate, custom-built jungle habitat that is more lush than half the apartments in Manhattan. He’s clearly coded as the kind of smug, evil millionaire the movies love hate. But how did he turn spider ownership into a money issue?

I know this will seem like a small, irrelevant detail to many people. It’s hardly the biggest hole in a film that’s mostly made up of nonsense, sequel teases, and random but prominent references to 2003, like the building-sized mural announcing 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 past 25 years? What does he want from life, besides killing some girls he keeps dreaming about? Does he have any existence beyond his plot function as an often faceless threat?

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

The ridiculous thing about it is that there are potential answers – and all 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 a web, but he can crawl along walls or ceilings, and he is durable enough to stand up and be mowed down by two separate instances to shake off fast-moving vehicles. , with no sign of permanent injuries. There’s probably a way to convert spider powers into money, perhaps through a famous, dashing Cary Grant-style jewel thiefor just 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 effects of the spider venom. That’s why Constance researched spiders in the Amazon in the first place before she died, because of legends about the poison’s healing properties. He may have become the world’s first spider-based pharmaceutical brother, doling out miracle cures from his secret single-spider factory in his penthouse.

Except… there’s no sign in this movie that he has the knowledge or connections to enter the pharmaceutical market, or that he has revolutionized the world by curing cancer via spider venom. If he was just handing out spider bites to extremely wealthy people on their deathbeds with otherwise incurable ailments, there would be a lot more super-powered spider people running around.

How do you get from “I have a spider” to “I have millions of dollars”? It irritates me because it feels like one Underpants Gnomes business plan that really worked, as ridiculous as that sounds.

Image: Columbia Photos

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

Immersing it in Marvel’s database And supervillain fan wikis didn’t help either. “He used his powers to create and develop a company” is about as specific as it gets. I think wall walking and having contact poison hands would be useful for corporate espionage and taking out the competition.

But that still leaves the same questions: What is this guy doing? What does he care? What is he good at? What’s his deal? Judging by the way he treats his only agent, Amaria (Girls‘ Zosia Mamet, in a thankless role as ‘woman who sits in front of many screens and offers periodic status reports’, he has no soft business skills or any vision, apart from the idea that when he shouts ‘ Get results now!’ in his subordinates they will suddenly overcome all their obstacles. I can definitely buy this guy as the head of a modern company. But the Creator of a?

I understand why the screenwriters thought none of this mattered. Ezekiel in this film is a one-dimensional villain whose goal is to threaten the slightly more realized protagonists. Its big story feature isn’t just the grim pursuit monster It follows, is to kill 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 purposefully engineer his death. (Which doesn’t quite explain why the story suggests that the movie’s teen superheroes would also be okay with killing him in cold blood, but I guess that’s just a dream, or an averted future that never happens. Assuming this movie no sequel.) It really doesn’t seem like anyone involved with the movie thought it needed any more of an identity than “climb the walls, be rich, hate the heroes.”

But what’s the point of a supervillain who has no apparent skills or connections in the real world, no meaningful personality or purpose, no thematic or symbolic weight? And besides, who doesn’t seem particularly smart, capable, or threatening? The The best supervillains are dark mirrors of their heroic enemies, illustrations of how easily a hero can go wrong. The most memorable villains are the ones with personality, flair, or at least a sense of menace. All that requires some sense of specificity, a sense of purpose, plan, cause, or at least a recognizable space in the world.

Instead, Ezekiel has a spider and money, and a strange, hand-waving connection between them. Even by the haphazard standards of mediocre recent superhero movies, that’s not much to hang a story on.