The recipe is as follows: a failed 2007 Spider-Man movie, an actor from a successful 2012 Batman movie and the ever-constant approach of Disney to buy up all of Sony’s movie rights. The result is a new Venom movie.
For the layman, “Venom” is a supervillain from the Spider-Man franchise who is the biological product of a reporter and an amorphous alien parasite. In most plots, “Spider-Man” bonds with the parasitic “symbiote,” which takes the form of a strength-multiplying black suit, and proceeds to severely piss off reporter “Eddie Brock.” Spider-Man eventually repents and sheds the suit, which Eddie then uses to take revenge on Spidey, joining with the discarded symbiote to become the large, black, muscly monster that is “Venom.”
But, when Sony, a company still unaffiliated with Disney’s gargantuan Marvel Cinematic Universe, announced an all-original Venom film with no Spider-Man involved, this turned the tables. Eddie’s still a reporter, the symbiote is still an alien, but the dynamic has shifted from villain to antihero. As a result, even though there’s quick action, scientific labs and an incredibly rare chemical—what my father calls “unobtainium”—Venom has a hard time feeling like a real superhero film.
But, what the hey, Venom is an antihero. Maybe his movie shouldn’t feel like a superhero film, especially since his non-hero status shows clearly throughout the movie. Tom Hardy plays Eddie as an antihero personality before he even becomes Venom, and his acting is just one of many impressive performances from the whole cast. Of the two live-action Venom portrayals, Hardy beats baby-faced Topher Grace 10 times over, partially because, unlike Grace in Spider-Man 3 (2007), Hardy’s face and Venom’s face share screentime equally without the actor’s paycheck disrupting the balance.
Where Eddie and Venom meet, however, is where the movie truly lost me.
To understand their relationship, one first has to remember that the symbiote is an alien. It has no sentiment, no emotions and it only speaks English because that’s the language wired in Eddie’s brain. So, when you’ve got an alien parasite using American colloquialisms, calling Eddie a “pussy” and asking him permission to eat people, it’s hard to take the movie or its titular character seriously. If this was Deadpool and comedy was the cornerstone of the entire plot, it would be okay, but the emotional levels Venom tries to achieve simply don’t match with the comic relief.
This is not the only hangup on Venom’s character. The movie takes almost an hour just to amp up to his first appearance, an appearance that, like innumerable moments in the film, the viewer’s probably already seen in a trailer. When Venom finally appears, the viewer sadly discovers that, even though Hardy portrayed a perfectly menacing “Bane” in The Dark Knight Rises (2012), he is either unable or unwilling to give Venom the same treatment. The Jekyll and Hyde comedy duo is satisfying as a second-best, but because it shows no apparent understanding of the metaphorical or psychological punch that made Venom cool since his 1988 debut, I can’t help but feel disappointed.
I don’t think Venom deserves to be completely overlooked as a legitimate Marvel movie or to be given 30 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The action’s good, the acting’s great and it’s not a terrible Venom movie overall. But this is not the movie I wanted for my favorite Marvel character of all time.
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