Review: Venom

The best parts of Venom are the parts you already know are going to be the best parts, aka every scene where Tom Hardy acts nuts. Which is almost but not quite all of his scenes; in one of the many ways in which this movie is slightly smarter than it initially seems, Eddie Brock (Hardy) starts and finishes the film as a perfectly normal and well-adjusted man. It's only every scene in between that he acts like a loopy drunk on the verge of freaking out.

That's because after that first scene he has a confrontation with billionaire (and secretly evil dude) Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) after which he rapidly loses his reporting job and the love of his previously adoring girlfriend Anne (Michelle Williams under a distracting wig). After that Hardy plays him as a good-natured dim-bulb drunk; it's a perfectly reasonable character choice.

And then, while researching a tip-off into Drake's scheme to kidnap the local homeless and use them as guinea pigs in a series of lethal experiments, he finds himself with an alien symbote spurting out of his body like living tar while whispering in his head about how much fun it'd be to eat people. That kind of thing definitely takes a toll on a guy. Which is why he ends up sitting in a lobster tank in the middle of a fancy restaurant during lunch chowing down on one of the inhabitants. 

But aside from the many, many joys of Hardy's unhinged performance, Venom is kind of a basic superhero film, a straightforward throwback to the pre-Marvel days when simply telling a "what's happening to me?" origin story was enough to wow the punters. That's not really a flaw; unlike current Marvel characters who come pre-loaded into a complex universe full of references and in-jokes to fill any dead air, Venom (the character) is a throwback himself.

Marvel movies are drawn almost entirely from the early days of the (comic-book) Marvel universe, where Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and Stan Lee were creating super-powered soap operas built as much around characters' relationships and inner turmoil as punching bad guys. But for a while in the late 80s and early 90s Marvel's big guns came from a different tradition. Characters like The Punisher, Cable, Wolverine and Venom were violent antiheroes, loners with minimal supporting casts (Wolverine had the X-Men, but they rarely turned up in his solo adventures) and stories built around looking badass and killing chumps, not angst and drama.

These characters have struggled at the cinema (they're hard-R archetypes in a PG genre), even if Marvel's first movie success - that'd be Blade - was basically one of them. Wolverine only really clicked as a movie in his final appearance (to date); The Punisher never really did. Marvel itself has given up on giving these guys movies, instead putting them in the Netflix corner of their universe. But Venom is a Spider-Man spin-off (he even appeared in the generally forgotten Spider-Man 3), and so now belongs (in part) to Sony. Welcome back to the big screen.

This return is pretty much deserved, even if the film is a sometimes bumpy ride and the extreme violence is largely neutered. On the one hand, there are a bunch of traditional Marvel laugh lines that Hardy has zero interest in selling; on the other, Venom calls Brock both a "loser" and a "pussy" and they're both big laughs. The story is the kind of simplistic series of events where the climax just kind of happens, but Hardy's performance has so much going on that having anything more involved going on would be a distraction.

That said, a bit more logic wouldn't hurt either. At one point we're told a pair of scientists let an alien life-form die because they weren't paying attention; at another a bunch of bad guys are ordered to kill Brock so they decide to take him for a walk out into the woods instead of promptly shooting him safely indoors. Venom bites at least two guys' heads off but we never see it happen; a cute dog and a small girl both presumably die from symbote possession but it all takes place off screen.

But yes, Venom does gets to make out on camera with Hardy. Why wouldn't you want to see this film?

- Anthony Morris