Venom is the latest attempt at a superhero flick from Sony, the studio that ruined Spiderman twice. The movie boldly turns back the clock 20 years on superhero movies, reminding us of a time when they were both bad and cheesy.
Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is your average super good-looking journalist turned super-powered crime fighter by a mysterious alien parasite known as Venom. The parasite has a mind of its own, working with Brock to achieve both of their aims.
Brock ends up losing his job and girlfriend (Michelle Williams) because of the actions of generic bad guy Carleton Drake (Riz Ahmed). You know that Drake is the bad guy because he wears black.
The central plot point of the movie is Brock’s attempt to stop a virus of symbiotic alien parasite that wants to take over the world. The parasite aims to use Carleton Drake’s privately-run space program to go into space and bring back more of its kind.
Eventually the parasite infects Drake like it did with Brock. For no apparent reason it makes Drake more evil and Brock more good, and they have a showdown that comes to a very predictable finale.
That’s really all there is to the plot, although Brock does other stuff in the second and third acts because this movie has to be two hours long.
The movie’s first mistake is making Eddie Brock a journalist. Why do superhero movies insist on journalists as alter egos? There is nothing fun or heroic about watching people squabble over sentence structure.
Watching the parasite spread should invoke horror as the contagion; instead it does nothing but serve as a reminder to use hand sanitizer at the airport.
What is Tom Hardy doing in this movie? His acting is great, but no amount of good acting on his part could have saved this movie. Seeing one of the best working actors today bumble around the screen, going from poorly drawn set piece to bad dialogue, is painful to watch.
Drake’s motivations are unclear—it seems that he’s evil just because the movie needed a villain. His dialogue isn’t much better. It sounds like a compilation of cliché things that bad guys say in other bad superhero movies. The dialogue in general only serves to set up the next scene instead of emerging organically.
The movie does have the odd good gag, but it’s trying way too hard to be funny. So many scenes that could have been interesting turn into jokes that fall flat.
While Venom had a great trailer that was incredibly well received, the movie itself feels like it was created just to create a few good scenes for the trailer to show off. Every scene not in the trailer was unentertaining filler or expository information to shove the characters into wherever the plot needed them to be.
Ultimately, Venom is just a bad superhero movie. Between cheesy acting and dialogue that’s only there because it has to be, it seems like Sony was more concerned with ticket sales than it was with actually making a good film.
Graphic by Farhan Tasin
