Oh, Sony, why can’t you just get be more like the rest of the cool kids? Everyone else is getting along, working together, putting out cool flicks, with intertwining stories and characters. And you’re just throwing Symbiote shit at the walls and hoping it sticks. Venom is the latest ill-advised cash grab, and suffice to say, it’s not great. Now, that doesn’t mean Sony’s not trying. It just means they’re trying all the wrong things. That said, there is a spark of naive goodness in this strange non-spin-off spin-off. And so, it’s not completely awful.
When Venom begins, a probe sent into space by the Life Foundation crashes back to Earth carrying four Symbiote, parasitic lifeforms that latch onto a host, imbuing them with new abilities. Drake (Riz Ahmed) believes these aliens are the key to humanity’s survival and strives to find a way to bond them with human test subjects. Meanwhile, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is a disgraced journalist, who is contacted to shine a light on Drake’s activities. When he breaks into the foundation, he finds himself bonded with an escaped Symbiote, Venom. The reluctant pair must then use their combined powers to evade capture, survive termination, stop Drake from infesting the world with monsters, and maybe even get Eddie’s ex (Michelle Williams) back. This is a love story after all.
When the trailers first dropped, This Guy had two immediate thoughts. First, Tom Hardy’s single American accent is absolutely ridiculous. His version of Eddie Brock seemed to channel the same quiet simpleton character Hardy played in The Drop. In all fairness, it seems the dialogue for the trailer was just badly cherry-picked. his voice isn’t nearly as annoying in the actual film. The second thought was, didn’t we see a trailer for a better looking film with this exact setup recently? Yes, we did. Upgrade, starring Logan Marshall-Green. You know, the other Tom Hardy. Now that movie as badass, and made great use of the “violent voice in my head” gimmick. Venom doesn’t do too bad with the chemistry between Brock and the Symbiote, mainly because acting opposite himself is basically Hardy’s specialty. Any scene that involves the pair just talking is actually quite enjoyable. There are even a few solid jokes thrown in.
“Outstanding! Now, let’s bite off all the heads and pile them up in the corner.”
Venom‘s failings are mainly due to Sony’s inability to escape the past. This flick would’ve been right at home back in 2002. If Hollywood made a Venom spin-off at the height of Raimi Spider-Man popularity, sealed it in a time capsule and opened it up today, it’d probably look exactly like this. The action is uninspired, and often way too dark to see properly. The villain is so over the top evil for no good reason, it’s like he was ripped straight from a Saturday morning cartoon (maybe this was intentional). Venom himself has the strangest, most childish personality the character has ever been assaulted with. And the post-credits scene, oh my. What could’ve been a solid tease for a future confrontation any comic fan would love to see, comes across as lazy schlock, with dialogue a 10-year old wouldn’t put in his fan fiction.
I don’t want you to think I didn’t enjoy myself; I did. But not as much as I could’ve, and not always for the right reasons. There is a sliver of a shard of a piece of a good movie somewhere inside Venom‘s erratic and overly long run time. But you have to look past a lot of unpleasant goop to find it. Keep Hardy, keep the design, and hell, keep the cheesy sequel bait at the end. But Sony needs to rework just about everything else if they truly want to hang a franchise on this Symbiote’s stretchy appendages.
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