Fish and Cherries Productions

Summary: Eddie Brock’s (Tom Hardy) life hits the skids when he unprofessionally tries to implicate philanthropist Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) in unethical practices. This stunt costs him his job, his home, and his fiancé Anne (Michelle Williams), but he gets another opportunity to investigate the company. He finds homeless people being experimented on with parasitic aliens called symbiotes and when Eddie makes his escape, one of them named Venom hitches a ride in him. This new union not only gives Eddie a new voice in his head, but newfound strength, agility, and superpowers. A good thing too, since there’s another symbiote named Riot on the loose who plans to bring more of its kind to Earth to ravage it. It’s a grudge match between two aliens and their human hosts with the fate of the Earth hanging on a thin, sinuous thread.

Review: Venom was not terrible, but I can’t really call it a good movie. One of the biggest problems is that the story goes through the same motions as tons of other superhero movies before it; rooted so deeply in Campbell’s hero’s journey concept that it’s started its own orchard. Another big problem is that the movie tries really hard to be edgy and winds up being gross. I understand that Venom is one of the greatest comic book anti-heroes and that things are going to get a little grim and gritty, but when you’ve got Tom Hardy drenched in his own sick eating handfuls of raw food and biting the heads off of live lobsters, you’ve officially crossed into the territory of “crap no one needs to see.”

However, in fairness, the fight scenes with Venom are unmatched awesomeness. Venom looks just plain cool and watching him mow down thugs and SWAT teams with complete brutality is a great treat. Unlike Deadpool, which played brutality for comedy, this movie puts you in the mindset of playing a video game where you utterly demolish opposing forces with total catharsis. The sole exception is Venom’s fight with Riot which becomes a bit hard to follow because both combatants have similar builds and color schemes. Black and grey blend together a little too well is all I’m saying.

I’m not sure how I feel about Sony’s new Spider-Man villain shared universe they’re starting with this movie, mostly because Sony has been terrible at setting them up so far. There might be some potential, but when your opening movie has that unforgivably bad “turd in the wind” line, you’re already skating on thin ice. Still, this Venom was leagues better than the one in Spider-Man 3, so it has that going for it. I guess this is one of those things where we’ll have to wait and see what happens next.

Still a better universe setup than Man of Steel.

Fun Tidbit #1: Tom Hardy has sauntered into superhero movies before, previously playing Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. In the Batman comics, Bane regularly gained super strength from a substance called… wait for it… Venom. I’d call it clever if I actually thought that Hollywood suits read comic books.

Fun Tidbit #2: So there was a big kerfuffle about this movie before it came out. The first trailer, when the characters talked about the symbiotes, showed them pronouncing it like “sim-bye-ote” rather than the more accepted and used “sim-bee-ote.” The uproar was massive and even Marvel took a jab at the pronunciation in a then-recent Spider-Man comic. The pronunciation got fixed for the film and it shows. I’m pretty sure the scenes where someone says “symbiote” and you can clearly see their mouth move can be counted on one hand.