Venom

Tom Hardy can't save this toothless, incoherent Spider-Man spin-off

Film Review by Joseph Walsh | 03 Oct 2018
Film title: Venom
Director: Ruben Fleischer
Starring: Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Riz Ahmed, Scott Haze, Reid Scott
Release date: 3 Oct
Certificate: 15

The sight of Tom Hardy clambering into a water tank full of lobsters in an upmarket San Francisco eatery while frantically jabbering away with the voice inside his head is one of the more entertaining scenes in Ruben Fleischer’s Venom. Sadly, it is one of the film's few that doesn’t feel dated and let down by incoherent plotting, tired tropes, lacklustre special effects and a shameful waste of a stellar cast (as well as Hardy, the line-up includes Michelle Williams and actor-rapper Riz Ahmed).

Hardy plays Eddie Brock, a San Francisco-based field-reporter who – while investigating a story about the ethically dubious CEO of the Life Corporation, Carlton Drake (Ahmed) – stumbles upon a parasitic alien life form. It subsequently imbues him with superpowers, making him look something like a steroid-addicted piranha dipped in ink.

In style and tone, Venom resembles Mark Dippé’s rightly-maligned Spawn (a character, like Venom, who was the creation of Todd McFarlane) or Top Cow comics’ The Darkness, aiming for a touch of the gothic and macabre blended with comic humour. When you’re dealing with a parasitic alien lifeform, you might expect some Cronenbergian body horror, but, disappointingly, there isn’t any. Nevertheless, some of the most enjoyable moments of the film are in the dialogue between Brock and his psychotic parasite.

Hardy has already expressed his frustration with the film, and it’s easy to see why. In fleeting moments, when he wrestles with the duality of the character, both in terms of the physical performance and the comedy, we get glimpses of what might have been. But the powers that be have played it safe instead.

Made “in association with Marvel”, this is Sony’s latest effort to exercise their copyright over the Spider-Man villains (one of the few properties not owned by Disney Marvel) and build their own version of the comic book universe. Taking the building-block-basics approach to the superhero movie genre, it has all the functional components of a well-worn origin story. Fleischer and his team of writers, who include Scott Rosenberg and Jeff Pinker, lay simple foundations for their new franchise. For a character as ripe for development as Venom, they had plenty of fertile ground to explore, yet instead deliver a highly derivative plot which has more in common with Francis Lawrence’s Constantine and Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four.

Much has been made of the 15-certificate, with many hoping for an ultra-violent film in the mould of Deadpool. But Venom most certainly isn’t that. More problematic are the bland action sequences, including a protracted motorcycle chase through San Francisco that was more dynamically rendered in Ant-Man and the Wasp only a few months ago, as well as a very tiresome final showdown.

Venom has two post-credit sequences: one setting up a sequel and the other, unconventionally, promoting the upcoming Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse animation. And this snippet of the new Spidey animation was more enjoyable than the entirety of Venom, which says it all.


Released by Sony

http://www.venom.movie/site/