Venom
First of all, let me just say that I never disliked the way Venom was handled in “Spider-Man 3.” Yeah, the last part of the movie veers into the absurd, but the way Sam Raimi handled the symbiote, black-suited Spidey, and everything when it came to Peter Parker’s story, has always worked fantastically for me in a deeply personal way. Removing Venom from a Peter Parker/Spider-Man story is an odd way of bringing the character back, but I’ll admit that the writers and director of this nonsense didn’t do an awful job of it.
Watching “Venom” become a Film Twitter obsession before it came to theatres has been fascinating, and hilarious. From the way people were discussing it, you’d think another “Batman & Robin” or “Catwoman”-level atrocity was on the way. I’m not going to say that Ruben Fleischer’s film is GOOD, but if you don’t get just a little bit of entertainment out of the absurd way it goes about its business, I don’t know that you’re being honest with yourself. This movie has some fun, crazy stuff, even if the story it tells is barely worth the effort.
The film begins with a space craft re-entering Earth’s atmosphere wrong, and crash-landing. It’s cargo, and three crew members, are compromised, but Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), the billionaire who sent it into space, is more concerned with making sure what it came back with is intact. Unfortunately, one of the containers opened on the crash, and the contents disappeared. The crash is a pending PR disaster which Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy), who does a TMZ-like show focused around amplifying the voices of the marginalized, is more than interested in exploiting, although when he takes some confidential information from his fiancee’s email (the fiancee, by the way, is played by Michelle Williams), it gets them both in trouble, and wrecks their relationship. Nothing an on-the-run symbiote can’t fix.
I’m curious as to how it escaped me that Williams was in this film as the love interest to Hardy’s Eddie Brock, but it’s something that made “Venom” a bit crazier to watch as the multiple Oscar-nominee handled a standard issue role that she can do only so much with. The real insanity, though, comes when Brock is infected by the symbiote, and they start to interact with one another. It brought back memories of watching Andy Serkis do Gollum and Smeagol in the same scene, but played like it was acted on a cocaine binge by Hardy, with a dark humor (sometimes unintentional) that has me thinking about Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove. Dare I say that the dynamic between Brock and Venom is genuinely engaging and emotionally honest as the two have to learn how to live with one another throughout the film? It’s a weird take on the buddy cop formula, but Hardy sells it as much as he can.
Fleischer is a long way from the surefire horror comedy of “Zombieland,” and even lesser entertainments like “30 Minutes or Less” and “Gangster Squad,” because the script for “Venom” is a mess in tone and logic. This film feels like an isolated effort to try and get something out of the character before Marvel steps back in to take control of it. A lot of hand-wringing came from the announcement of it having a PG-13 rating, despite Fleischer and others saying it would be R-rated, at first. The harder rating wouldn’t have helped the quality of the filmmaking (although the Venom effects aren’t bad, Fleischer doesn’t really have an eye for this type of action, and it’s pretty generic, in that front), though it might have resulted in a more consistent tone if it had leaned into its subversiveness like the Deadpool films have.
I don’t think “Venom” is a good movie. It’s too generic when it should be too insane, and too dour and typical superhero film when it wants to go against the grain. It does have an awesome Eminem track that starts the end credits, and gives Hardy some wild moments to play, but it feels like a wasted opportunity more than anything to do something fresh, and it often goes to predictable. That being said, it has some entertainment value for how crazy it can be, and that is worth checking out, if you so wish.
