Movie Review: Venom (2018)

Venom [2018]

I have been pretty lax at reviewing movies. I had intended to do one-MCU-movie-per-month as we count down to Avengers 4, but evidently that hasn't really been a thing. But here's a thing! Venom!

And Sony's Venom movie has came under heavy fire in the internet due to a multitude of reasons. Some people are just angry that the gory, brutal villain-cum-antihero Venom isn't getting an R-rated movie. A vast majority are just angry that the movie wasn't part of the MCU shared universe like Spider-Man himself. Some are angry that Venom is getting a solo movie with absolutely no ties to Spider-Man at all. It's all part of the whole Sony/Marvel IP deal nonsense that honestly feels rather ridiculous... but that's neither here nor there. 

I was definitely pretty unenthused about this movie when the first trailers popped up (which, y'know, featured no Venom), but ended up going to watch the movie anyway last weekend. I respect Tom Hardy enough as an actor, and at least we'll get some cool blob-tendril monster fights, right?

And, well, while I'm not the most well-learned Marvel Comics fanboy, I have actually read a bunch of Venom stories in my time, being a pretty huge fan of the character from what I saw of him in cartoons and video games. And like most, I was pretty disappointed that the live-action incarnation of Venom in the critically-panned Spider-Man 3 felt like it was shoehorned in as an afterthought. Which it sort of is. A character with a story and a 'gimmick' as intimate as Venom requires more than to be a second-stringer in an already crowded movie, and while it does break most established Marvel lore about how Venom started off as a black suit that Spider-Man donned... breaking away from that, hate it or love it, does allow the movie to actually stand on its own instead of flopping around with the "so, uh, you established a superhero in this setting, where are they now?" question that hung around Suicide Squad's neck. I'm not saying it's the ideal move, and in an ideal world we'd have everything in perfect canon like the comics. But it's what we get. So instead of decrying 'what may have been', how good is Venom the movie, really?

It's... it's entertaining. Certainly far more fun and less bland than the trailers led me to believe. The plotline is honestly pretty basic for a superhero origin story, tailored to fit Eddie Brock's retooled character. And while it might sound like heresy, I actually am glad that the movie keeps it self-contained. And Tom Hardy is good enough of an actor to portray the movie's version of Eddie Brock, who... sort of flip-flops between being kind of a loser and an inherently good man. Or at least someone with morals. Like Suicide Squad, though, Venom does lean into "Eddie is a hero... that maybe sometimes kills" a wee bit too much. And the biggest problem this movie perhaps has is never really settling down on a tone. Is it a funny buddy-cop comedy, or a far more serious "two people must learn to share one body" action-drama? It never quite manages to get the balance right in my opinion, although I do buy that the Venom symbiote is simultaneously a psychotic, hungry madman that eats people's faces and tears people apart, while at the same time behaves like a bit of a teenage edgelord going "pussy". I really think that the movie doesn't quite make the transition between the Venom symbiote being an opportunistic parasite into an actual mutually-beneficial symbiote that likes Eddie, though.

Also love that Venom is also voiced by Tom Hardy, really selling the schizophrenic-but-not-quite deal going on here. 

The rest of the movie flows relatively similar to how a superhero origin story goes, honestly. We get the origin story and the quick establishment of main villain Carlton Drake (the fantastic Riz Ahmed), who is this.... well-acted but ultimately one-dimensional "FOR THE GREATER GOOD" mad multimillionaire/'scientist" that discovers the four Symbiotes. One of them gloops away and spends the entire movie just sort of jumping from people to people (how does Riot buy that plane ticket?) before finding its way to Drake at around the final act. 

Meanwhile, Eddie Brock's career is ruined for investigating Carlton Drake's company, the Life Foundation, and that cost him both his investigative reporter career and his girlfriend, who got fired thanks to him. A timeskip later, and Eddie is spurred into investigating Life Foundation again despite being pretty out-of-luck by one of LIfe Foundation's scientists, and during the infiltration of the company, Eddie stumbles in the unguarded (always, always no guards in these high-tech superhero origin labs, huh?) experimentation station and bonds to the Venom symbiote...

And then Eddie goes super-crazy, allowing Tom Hardy to channel his inner Nicholas Cage, and then we get action scenes! Non-stop action scenes with a couple of hilarious jokes here and there, and the action scenes are, if nothing else, amazingly portrayed. The gloop-y Venom symbiote tentacles looks so amazingly rendered, the actual burly Venom form looks amazing in motion and moves in a bizarrely inhuman way that I imagine that particular character would do in a live-action adaptation. 

As you expect from these sort of movies, Eddie and Venom get separated a bit -- easily the weakest part of the movie that felt kind of out of nowhere -- which honestly seems to just be an excuse to make a sexy, sexy She-Venom CGI model show up for a bit. And then we get the final battle between Venom and Riot, which is... pretty fucking amazing, I'm not going to lie. The movie does just enough to tell us the backstory behind the symbiotes as aliens without going too deep into the lore and overwhelming someone discovering Venom for the first time. It tries to hint at a bigger world (more symbiotes, plus Carnage in the mid-credits scene) while at the same time not falling into the trap of the Amazing Spider-Man movies and keeping things self-contained around Eddie, Venom, Anne and Drake. 

(I didn't really talk about Anne a lot, but I'm really ambivalent about her. She's competently written and acted, and never becomes a damsel in distress, but she's such an accessory to Eddie and doesn't really have any sort of real character growth. )

My biggest problem? It's not even the inconsistent tone, which I think honestly works in this movie's "multiple personalities coexisting in a single body" theme. Yes, sure, it's pretty irritating to jump from the far more slow burn of the opening to the hectic and action-packed high octane ride of the second half, and that's not to mention that you're either going to like or hate Tom Hardy's exaggerated performances as "Eddie Brock not having a nice day". I personally enjoyed them, honestly, and Venom being kind of a douchebag works well for me.

But it's the fact that... the movie seems to be edited pretty weirdly. What was the point of the other two symbiotes if they're going to die offscreen? What was that whole fake-out with the Venom symbiote 'dying' thanks to the rocket, and surviving with no explanation? Did we really need to have Dan, as well acted as he is? What the hell was the point of Eddie and Venom being separated, other than to shoehorn She-Venom into it all? I really think all of these could've been removed and replaced with Eddie and Venom actually learning to co-exist, and even if the studio doesn't want to delve into the darker, edgier antihero tropes, they really could've made the movie a lot tighter.

Bottom line, though? As much as Venom is flawed, I really do think that the naysayers are truly being hyperbolic. Venom is a perfectly serviceable movie that is fun -- and certainly doesn't really pretend to be anything other than that. Sure, it could've been a lot better, but it serves its role as a standalone blockbuster movie pretty damn well -- something that I really would rank among the average MCU output -- although certainly far from its best. If nothing else, watch it just for the pretty badass scenes of symbiote combat.