Venom - 13 Nerdy Nights of Horror Day 2

After the backlash they received for how poorly executed he was in Spiderman 3, Sony made has been desperately trying to make a spin-off film of the character Venom to say sorry to the fans. An idea like this didn’t seem to be possible, since it would involve starting up a new Spiderman series after the symbiote was destroyed in Spiderman 3, but after the Marvel Cinematic Universe started to make its presence known, that possibility seemed more and more likely. Once Marvel finally got Spidey to join up with the Avengers in Captain America: Civil War and eventually getting a solo film (disregarding MY thoughts on that), it seemed like everything was going into place…almost.

Despite Marvel now having joint rights with Sony over Spiderman, Sony still has complete creative control over the film rights of Spidey’s villains, INCLUDING Venom; and one of the major problems that has been frequently brought up whenever the topic is addressed, is this: how are you going to make a Venom movie, without Spiderman, the very character needed to truly create him? Not only that, but the decision to make the film PG-13, especially when 20th Century Fox had already proven three times already that there is a massive audience for it, sends a message that only the studio (and Tom Hardy) were the ones who wanted this.

In the movie, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is an investigative journalist, who falls hard on his luck after snooping through the wrong guy, Carlton Drake; he loses his job, his home, and his fiance. When he comes into contact with one of Drake’s escaped aliens, the symbiote, Eddie soon finds himself with a new companion that has an agenda to follow of his own.

Now before we get into this, I want to remind some of you of the movie that came out earlier this year, Upgrade; it had the same kind of synopsis as Venom, being that it was about a guy who loses everything, but gets a “friend” that latches on and helps him get revenge, by controlling his body. It’s a fantastic flick, but seeing it and then looking at Venom, I got a good indication as to what that already did wrong.

While the film was intended to have a PG-13 rating, but a “hardcore” one, it feels pretty choppy in some places; not as bad as in Slender Man, but you can definitely tell that they were cutting corners quite a lot. Not only that, but when doing a CGI characters that’s mostly black goo, doing night time action scenes makes it incredibly hard to see even who is fighting. The worst of them all is the climax, which looks so damn sloppy and messily edited, it felt like something out of Transformers 4; and for this to be the climactic battle of the movie that they heavily promoted, it’s just pathetic. And it’s sad because Ruben Fleischer is a much better director than this

I will admit, Tom Hardy in the first half of the movie does good with what he’s given and does act more like how Eddie Brock is supposed to be portrayed, but his character doesn’t really evolve throughout the course of the film. By the time he’s on his own living in an apartment after losing everything, he never really changes much after that, even WITH the symbiote. And for a film that’s 100 minutes long, it takes an hour for Venom to actually show up on screen. Even then, the only dialogue that I got a kick out of him was when he called Eddie a pussy. This leads to my biggest complaint, which is a giant nitpick, but...I’m sorry, the moment the symbiote said “I am Venom” is when I tuned out of the movie. I know they really wanted to work around the whole Spiderman inclusion, but the idea of the symbiote calling himself “Venom” without any reason as to why, and hearing it say “I Am,” it just really irked me the wrong way. Honestly, had this film taken place in The Amazing Spiderman series, I would have had an easier time buying it; even if you didn’t like those films, it would have been a lot easier to incorporate some connection to Spiderman by just name-dropping Oscorp, indicating that maybe Harry Osborn hired Drake to use the symbiote to create an anti-Spidey. It’s not the best explanation, but I’d buy it.

As for the rest of the cast, they’re all pretty much wasted for C-grade material, and these are all actors I’ve seen do good before. Riz Ahmed (Drake/Riot), Michelle Williams (Annie), Jenny Slate, Woody Harrelson, it’s like why go out of your way to get these people if this is the best you could offer? Heck, even Harrelson’s mid-credits cameo didn’t work, because the wig they put on him looked like it was last minute; we all know he doesn’t have much hair to begin with, but come on! You could have scrapped the wig entirely and just dyed what hair was there, and it would have been fine!

So is Venom the worst film of the year? No, I've still seen worse, but with everything that was a negative didn't help either. I love Tom Hardy’s performance, but the rest is still half assed. And with the inevitable sequel, I don't think they'll have the same luck as here. I say that, because the big hype for this film was seeing Venom kick ass the way we wanted to see it; now that we’ve seen it in one movie, how long could that last?

Rating: D