Venom is a spin-off of sorts within the Sony-controlled but Marvel Studios-sanctioned Spider-Man universe. Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy, playing a character previously portrayed by Topher Grace in Spider-Man 3) is an investigative reporter working out of San Francisco that comes in contact with the titular alien lifeform while investigating Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) and allegations against his company regarding unethical human testing. Despite technically taking place in the same world as Tom Holland’s Spider-man, and by extension the rest of The Avengers, this film operates entirely apart from any references to the established Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The core issue I have with the film is that it feels like it was cobbled together from two or three different scripts with no attempt made at consolidating wildly different tones. At times it feels like it wants to be a hard R-rated and gory horror/action film and at other times it stuck close to feeling more like a formulaic superhero movie of the early 2000s. It is quite clear that concessions were made in order to appeal to a wider PG-13 audience as any hint of violence is interrupted with quick cuts away from the action. In the film, Drake finds out that unless these alien “symbiotes” bond to a proper and compatible human host, both are destroyed as the host is eaten alive from the inside out. This is prophetic of final film itself: two disparate and incompatible halves that cannibalize each other rather than synergize effectively.
The only thing that stops Venom from being a complete and utter waste of time is Hardy’s dual performance at the core of the film. In addition to playing Eddie, he also lends his voice to Venom, which makes for surprisingly entertaining banter between the two. It’s this comedic levity, while a bit incongruous with the darker elements of the film, that keeps the film entertaining. Ahmed, who serves at the antagonist of the film, feels horribly miscast in the role of a swaggering, charismatic CEO that succumbs to a more powerful symbiote. I kept feeling like he was trying to exude a powerful physicality that just wasn’t working for 5-foot-8 Ahmed.
You can definitely feel there’s a good movie in there, somewhere between the lines. There’s a very entertaining performance at its core with the potential for very inventive set-pieces that is never fully-realized. The action scenes we get are frustratingly overly-chaotic and at times claustrophobic to the point where the camera is so close to the action that you’re not quite sure what you’re supposed to be looking at. It reminds me in more ways than one of the 2015 reboot of Fantastic Four. Both feel like failed attempts to bridge a gap between comic-book shenanigans with hardcore body horror that were pulled in too many directions to satisfy anyone completely. It’s a pity that there are glimpses of things I really like about Venom that were ultimately eviscerated and reassembled into something that is way less than the sum of its parts.
6/10