Venom Review

Spider-man is one of Sony’s most lucrative film properties. But the studio is at a crossroads because of the failure of The Amazing Spider-man series and needing to work with Marvel to bring the character into the MCU. In 2018 Sony tried to show what they could do with the property with the spin-off Venom and the animated film Spider-man: Into the Spider-Verse.

A space shuttle crashes on Earth carrying alien lifeforms. The Life Foundation bring these lifeforms to their labs in San Francisco. Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is a journalist who finds evidence that The Life Foundation has been experimenting on homeless people and goes to their labs to investigate. There he encounters The Symbiote and becomes the anti-hero Venom.

Venom was a comic book movie where most of the comic book was ignored. It took some basic ideas and character names and that’s it. This approach can work: films like The Mask, V for Vendetta, and Kingsman: The Secret Service had little to do with their source material and were great movies. But there were also a lot of disasters, like Judge Dredd, From Hell, and Catwoman, and Venom was closer to the latter than the former.

The obvious issue was the filmmakers were trying to make a Venom origins story without Spider-man. Venom is a character tied to the web-slinger. The Symbiote got his spider powers from Spider-man and Eddie Brock had a vendetta against Peter Parker. The filmmakers couldn’t even get the setting right because they moved the characters to the other side of America. The character’s personality wasn’t anything like it was in the comic book. Nor was Eddie Brook or Venom’s personality anything like what he was in the comics. The filmmakers were repeating the same mistakes as Spider-man 3 because Venom bore no resemblance to the comics – at least Sam Raimi’s excuse was he was forced to include Venom in his film.

Even if fidelity to the comic books is ignored Venom was a poor standalone film. The most obvious issue was its tone. Venom seemingly was going to be more a horror-inspired superhero film. The first act had an evil corporation capturing the aliens and showed homeless and desperate people being forced to bind with The Symbiotes. However, the film makes a sharp turn into comedy when Eddie bonds with his Symbiote. Eddie turns into a madman: his first action was to scavenge his bins for food and then interrupts his ex-fiancé’s date which ends with him going into the lobster tank.

The second act also turned into a strange buddy comedy. Eddie ends up hearing voices in his head and believes he’s going crazy. He even speaks with the voice in his head and Venom physically shows himself as face made of tar. The filmmakers were trying to have a dynamic like Gollum and Smeagol or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. But it came across more like Homer Simpson arguing with his own brain.

On the surface Tom Hardy seems like perfect casting as Eddie Brock/Venom. Hardy was of a similar build to the comic book character. But he acted as a scared maniac with an unbelievable amount of energy. It’s so strange that such good casting could go so horribly wrong. Hardy known mostly for serious, dramatic roles often playing hard men. It was disguised to try and turn Hardy and Eddie Brock into a comical loser.

The screenplay was a joke with its story, ideas and structure. The first act had big issues. The film opens with the space shuttle crashing and the Life Foundation taking The Symbiotes. Then it shows Eddie Brock interviewing the CEO of The Life Foundation, gets fired and struggles to get a new job before a six-month time jump. The film could have quickened it pacing with the Space Shuttle crashing, have the six-month time jump and then have a whistleblower come to Eddie with information about the human experimentation.

The rules of the film were inconsistent. A prime example was when the scientists state the Symbiotes need compatible hosts and they would kill them. The Symbiotes killing the host was ignored later in the film.

The official runtime for the film was 112 minutes. But if the credits, and credit scenes, were excluded the film only runs for 90 minutes. It’s surprisingly short for a comic book because two hours is usually the norm. Venom’s amount of content matches something Judge Dredd or Fantastic Four (2015) which were notorious flops.

Venom was meant to be an origins story and there are plenty of great examples to follow. Spider-man, Batman Begins, and Iron Man showed the trials their title characters had to go through. They had to learn to use their powers, train hard or develop new technology. They all had personal struggles and journals of some sort. Venom had little of this. The Symbiote did everything through instinct, so Eddie didn’t need to learn to use his powers. After the six-month time jump the film’s timeline was no more than 24 hours.

Venom was rated 15 in the UK, but it was a soft 15. There wasn’t much in the way of violence – the most shown was some broken bones but the characters who had these injuries healed like Wolverine. Venom does eat people but most of these acts were off-screen.

What prevents Venom from being one of the worst superhero films ever made was it had decent special effects and action. The chase in San Francisco and Venom’s fight with the SWAT were done to a decent standard. It’s not a Catwoman or Fantastic Four (2015) level of embarrassment.

One of the most infamous lines from the film was when Venom said ‘like a turd, in the wind.’ That’s an apt description of Venom because it felt like nothing more than a corporately created product to appeal to adolescent boys. It worked because Venom made over $850 million at the box-office and it has earned a sequel.