DIRECTOR: Ruben Fleischer
CAST: Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Riz Ahmed, Jenny Slate
REVIEW:
First things first: Venom is not an especially good movie. Nor is it the mind-bogglingly horrendous epic trainwreck some have inflated its notoriety into. Rather, it resides in that cluttered middle ground of “meh” occupied by titles like Green Lantern. The concept was a questionable one to begin with: despite his origin story being inextricably linked to Spider-Man in the comics, Sony in its eternal infinite wisdom has decided to slap together a solo Venom movie which is not connected to the Marvel Cinematic Universe—or at least no connection is ever explicitly drawn—therefore existing in some netherworld of its own (though there’s still a Stan Lee cameo). With its short length, dodgy CGI, and jokey tone, it feels like some throwback to the ’90s or early 2000s (there’s even an Eminem song over the end credits), the kind of comic book movie that might have been adequate in the days when there wasn’t much competition but feels outdated nowadays. And for the character of Eddie Brock/Venom, last seen on the big screen in 2007’s likewise misbegotten Spider-Man 3 (where he was played by Topher Grace), Sony’s second attempt at bringing him to the screen is no more successful than the first. To the extent that Venom works, it’s in its dark comedy aspect, not its terminally pedestrian and generic superhero (or anti-hero) narrative.
The last version of Venom we saw was a straightforward villain and a foe of Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man, but this is his solo movie, so he’s been bumped up (and watered down) to an anti-hero. Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is a hotshot investigative reporter with an axe to grind about social justice, whose crusading runs him afoul of the Life Foundation and its CEO Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), who has gotten his hands on several parasitic alien “symbiotes”, writhing masses of goo which Drake is obsessed with bonding to human hosts (and unconcerned about the bodies he leaves littered in the wake of scientific breakthrough). When Eddie goes off-script and ambushes Drake with unwanted questions during an interview, he ends up losing both his job and his lawyer girlfriend Anne Weying (Michelle Williams), who dumps him when he breaches her trust and gets her fired. Six months later, tipped off by a Life Foundation whistleblower (Jenny Slate), Eddie has a chance encounter with the symbiote Venom. Soon, Eddie is sweaty, delirious, ravenously hungry, and hearing a sinister voice in his head, and Drake is dispatching a goon squad to get his symbiote back. But Venom has other ideas, and Eddie is about to get dragged along for the ride.
Venom starts out feeling like a straightforward sci-fi horror movie, then morphs into a dark comedy once Venom “bonds” with Eddie, and ends up a generic and pedestrian superhero (or anti-hero) narrative. Insofar as it “works”, it’s in its dark comedy quotient. Some of the humor is effective, especially when an unusually loosy goosy Tom Hardy is flailing all over the place wrestling with his inner demon like Jim Carrey in The Mask (Hardy shows more flair for slapsticky physical comedy than might be expected), and Venom (also voiced by Tom Hardy, though unrecognizably so) is dropping one-liners and insults inside Eddie’s noggin. How off-the-wall does this section of the movie get? Wait for the scene when a ravenously hungry Eddie goes on a rampage through a restaurant devouring food off people’s plates and then dives into a lobster tank.
Alas, Venom isn’t really meant to be a comedy (though Tom Hardy’s wacky, spastic performance sometimes leaves one feeling he missed the memo about that), so the Eddie/Venom antics eventually take a backseat to generic action sequences and a terminally generic narrative. The weakest is the climax, which is so predictable anyone could see it coming from a hundred miles away when the bad guy dons his own symbiote just in time to become the Big Bad Opposite Number for a rushed and shoehorned smackdown with the (anti)hero, in what feels like an even weaker and more obligatory knock-off of the climax of Iron Man (which was also the weakest and most generic part of that movie). Other plot elements, like Eddie’s abrupt career collapse, he and Anne’s breakup, and Vemom’s abrupt turn-around in motivations, are equally rushed and contrived, and despite starring a dark anti-hero with a penchant for eating people, the movie is afraid to have any edge (reportedly it was originally intended to be rated R, before Sony chopped it down to a tame PG-13 that skirts around any graphic violence). Likewise, Eddie Brock in the comics is an unsavory figure with or without Venom’s influence, but the movie waters him down into a nice guy with a monster inside him. Somewhere in an alternate universe, there’s a far darker and grittier Venom solo movie, but there’s precious little dark or gritty to be found here. Nor does the budget show up onscreen; the CGI appears cheaply-done and overly cartoonish, and the climax is two interchangeable blobs of splashy special effects tearing each other apart until we can’t tell which is which. The movie ends with a ho-hum whimper.
The acting is spotty. Tom Hardy leads the way and makes the most impression—-though not necessarily for all the right reasons—manically sweating, twitching, and flailing his way through the movie in a strange, campy performance that at times leaves one wondering if he got a different memo from his co-stars and is under the impression he’s in a remake of The Mask. I’m not sure if the goofy, semi-comedic way Hardy has chosen to play Eddie sabotages the movie or salvages some scrap of entertainment value, but he’s at least more fun to watch than a phoned-in Michelle Williams, whose “performance” is as distractingly bad as her wig, but then her character is paper-thin anyway…just the perfunctory and obligatory “love interest” who basically exists to serve convenient plot purposes at opportune moments. As our ho-hum villain, Riz Ahmed is relegated to the umpteenth rendition of the generic one-dimensional Evil CEO type (I guess Ben Mendelsohn was busy), and Jenny Slate is a “hi and bye” plot device. For those who stick around to the mid-credits scene, there’s a cameo by Woody Harrelson as Cletus Kasady/Carnage, Venom’s nemesis in the comics, obviously being set-up for a sequel which may or may not ever see the light of day (though, in a movie not distinguished for its special effects, Harrelson’s wig is the worst of all).
Venom feels forgettable and insignificant, as unlikely to be a franchise-launcher as Martin Campbell and Ryan Reynolds’ forgotten Green Lantern. It offers a few (intentional) laughs, but wastes an edgy character and intriguing Jekyll and Hyde premise (and what Tom Hardy might have done with such a role had both he and the filmmakers taken it more seriously). It feels cheap and cheesy and like a rather superfluous cash grab. If this is the caliber of stand-alone comic book movie Sony churns out, it’s better off leaving things in the MCU’s more capable hands.
* * 1/2