MORE VENOM NEEDED AS ‘VENOM’ SHAMBLES ONTO OUR SCREENS…

One of Marvel’s most enigmatic, complex and badass characters comes to the big screen, starring Academy Award® nominated actor Tom Hardy as the lethal protector Venom.

Let’s get one thing straight, Venom isn’t a bad movie. In fact, in parts, it’s entertaining. This statement alone is sufficient to stir up some hatred among the critic community, but Culturedemandsgeeks doesn’t really care.

The first time I came across Venom as a Marvel character was in the ’90s Spider-Man animated series. Let’s not forget that Spider-Man 3 happened, which still pains us to this day.

Then, we hear the great Tom Hardy is involved–

But–

This is what a series of bad decisions stretched out over a very long development history looks like.

Venom wants to be a darkly comedic body-horror and a compelling anti-hero comic book caper.

It also tries to shock life back into Sony’s sub-Marvel mini-verse, which seemingly died along with the Amazing Spider-Man films. It only succeeds in being a supremely average film that mostly frustrates and baffles rather than thrills.

Some may find Tom Hardy’s performance charming, which it is in places. But it centres on his struggling with a super powerful alien that’s taking over his body, which sees him verbally arguing with it. That sort of thing has been done much better, many times – most recently with Upgrade.

Journalist reporter Eddie Brock investigates the Life Foundation, headed by philanthropist Carlton Drake, who is using humans as an experiment to meld with alien life-forms to dire results. When discovering the truth about their purpose, Brock himself is infected with one of the life-forms, and discovers new abilities given him by the creature. Now he must stop an even more sinister plot unfolding from the Life Foundation which puts our world at risk.

The first act of the film spends a lot of time establishing the lead characters, both the hero or anti-hero in this case, as well as some form of a villain. Unfortunately, Riz Ahmed’s character was forgettable as the villain Carlton Drake.

And every other character is a throwaway for this movie for me. Wasted talent belongs too Eddie Brock’s former fiancé Anne Weying, played by Michelle Williams. But her character feels like wasted potential for more than just a side character.

Her boyfriend, Dan, is a bit more memorable because he’s hilariously unbelievable as the boyfriend when it comes to dealing with Brock.

The horde of poor filmmaking choices could be forgiven if it at least delivered on the action, but it sure as shit does not. Every moment of action is created in a computer and most of it is surprisingly awful, fake-looking garbage. There’s also no blood spilt on-screen, despite a large amount of beheadings and dismemberments carried out.

Although director Ruben Fleischer is tonally all over the place, I like how all-in he goes with the ridiculousness. I can honestly say, I was surprised at the end product. It’s not polished, it’s not great, and there are loads of generic tropes scattered throughout the film. He’s made something shit, but at least he’s gone full bonkers with that shit – the climactic fight scene is between two entirely CGI-created alien demon things leaping about on a rocket ship. In other movies, someone might’ve tried to intervene and patch something with less nonsense in, which would’ve created an even less interesting hodgepodge of shit.

Last week I managed to see the new (not quite rebooted) Predator film. It too, wasn’t half bad, with a lot of edge-of-your-seat action, most of which were R-rated. I bring this up because the film starts as with many other alien-related films with a crash landing of a spaceship onto earth in some remote place on earth, with the contents of some rare or unknown cargo gone missing.

Venom starts off in almost this exact manner, which left me with a great sense of unease as to how generic the film would be, and with the negative thoughts about the review still fresh in my memory, dreaded what was to come.

VERDICT:

Venom suffers from its marketing as it fails to deliver on the promises of its promotions. There is nothing memorable about the characters of the film. There are a few nice laughs to be had both with and at Venom. It’s a silly, cartoonish misfire that’s bloody hard to enjoy.

2/5 STARS