This review will include spoilers. Isn't Spoiler the name of a symbiote? Sounds like it should be.
I'm still surprised this film even exists. After over a decade in development hell, with successive attempts at both standalone films and franchise entries, Venom finally arrives on the big screen. Bizarrely, after all this time, Sony fast-tracked this production, which suffered from considerable last minute rewriting and heavy editing in post-production. Unfortunately, it really shows. Tom Hardy says that the best forty minutes ended up on the cutting room floor, so just possibly, there was a good film here before it was hacked apart.
It's not that Venom isn't entertaining. It's pretty OK when just approached as mindless fun, which is fair enough, and I can imagine sticking this on Netflix to watch with a beer or two in future. Nonetheless, this is a hard film to love. There are two major, fundamental problems: firstly, no doubt due to all the last minute monkeying around, is the sheer incoherence of the plot; secondly, there's a crippling inconsistency of tone.
To address the first issue, it's painfully clear that rewrites and re-edits were made with very little consideration to the overall plot. While we're used to early trailers showing somewhat different versions of scenes than those that eventually appear in the final cut, there are scenes with Venom that have completely different dialogue dubbed over them. Some of the scenes, such as the closing moments which see Eddie pop to his local convenience store only to unleash Venom on a thug who's robbing the place, seems to have been moved from much earlier in the film. There are baffling changes in character motivation, with only the slimmest explanation, if any.
To begin with, the film starts out as a fairly earnest sci-fi thriller, with the extraterrestrial symbiotes being used as the basis for new biologically-altering treatments to allow colonisation of other planets. Lead scientist/businessman Carlton Drake is well portrayed by Riz Ahmed, and has a clear motivation, as someone who believes his own hype and whose ambition has overreached his morality. He very quickly descends to become a moustache-twirling villain, though, viciously sending people to their deaths because, well, that's what villains do.
Tom Hardy does everything he can as Eddie Brock, a reporter who is determined to expose corruption and illegal activity regardless of what he's assigned to do. It inevitably bites him in the ass, he loses his job and his fiance and his swanky apartment, dragging him down into apathy and depression. This characterisation, held up by Hardy's performance, is about the only believable element of the film. Hardy convinces both as the swaggering, cocky early version of Eddie, and the broken, isolated version later, giving him a likeable everyman quality in both periods.
A series of unlikely events see the Venom symbiote fuse with Eddie, and unfortunately it's once Venom comes on the scene that things go south. Venom works Eddie like a puppet, except where he's speaking to him and goading him on. Venom's never been the most consistently explained character in comics, and while the final act sees the man and the alien unify into a working duo, there's no consistency concerning how much control Eddie has on his actions. Venom works well when it's a force that emphasises the worst aspects of a person, and can be an antihero that is always on the edge of going too far. Given Eddie's disillusionment in the film, there'd be a lot to work with here, both in his isolation from humanity and his rediscovery of his need to do good. There's no sense of any of that, barring a couple of hastily appended lines to set up a sequel.
The symbiote is also killing Eddie, except when it's suddenly not, for vaguely defined reasons. Drake is possessed by his own symbiote, because the symbiotes can only bond with those they are compatible with, except when the plot needs otherwise. He then moves from moustache-twirling villain to unstoppable killing machine villain, becoming a bigger, nastier version of Venom, and it turns out the symbiotes are now invading. Then Venom decides he likes the Earth and being stuck on Eddie, so he's a good guy now and is going to save the world.
Meanwhile, we have a few supporting characters. Michelle Williams plays Anne Weying, Eddie's fairly unsympathetic ex-fiance. She's surprisingly bad in it, but in all fairness she has very little to work with. There's also a brief moment where she becomes She-Venom (which is basically Venom, but with tits), but this is, thankfully, fleeting. Her new boyfriend is Dan, played by Reid Scott, who's a surgeon and is instrumental in keeping Eddie alive in the bit of the plot when the symbiote is killing him. Pleasingly, there's virtually no rivalry or animosity between them, since they're actually both pretty decent guys who could probably do better than Anne. Jenny Slate is pretty brilliant as Dr. Skirth, a scientist working for Drake who takes a stand against his amoral actions, a character that I'd actually have liked to spend some time with. Unfortunately, she doesn't last long.
I was never quite convinced that Venom could carry a film completely divorced from Spider-Man, since so much of the character depends on their antagonistic relationship, but the set-up used here could work if they'd actually had the guts to go for it. It's pretty clear that early intentions were for an R-rated film, allowing genuine bloodshed and selling the horror side of the concept. Instead, Sony bizarrely opted to make the film a PG-13 (it's rated 15 in the UK), neutering it and leeching most of the power of the concept. Again, you could do a Spider-Man film and introduce the more family-friendly version - this is a kids' cartoon character after all - or you could let rip and make it stand on its own as an adult-oriented superhero film. To start with the latter and then cut the film apart to try to try to make it into the former, in the apparent hope that it could lead to crossovers with Marvel movies in the future, was always doomed to failure.
As it is, we end up with an entertaining but dimwitted mess, that has no clear idea of what kind of film it is or who it's aimed at. By the end, it feels almost like Men in Black, only without the humour. At least Woody Harrelson's cameo as Cletus Kasady has promise.
I'm still surprised this film even exists. After over a decade in development hell, with successive attempts at both standalone films and franchise entries, Venom finally arrives on the big screen. Bizarrely, after all this time, Sony fast-tracked this production, which suffered from considerable last minute rewriting and heavy editing in post-production. Unfortunately, it really shows. Tom Hardy says that the best forty minutes ended up on the cutting room floor, so just possibly, there was a good film here before it was hacked apart.
It's not that Venom isn't entertaining. It's pretty OK when just approached as mindless fun, which is fair enough, and I can imagine sticking this on Netflix to watch with a beer or two in future. Nonetheless, this is a hard film to love. There are two major, fundamental problems: firstly, no doubt due to all the last minute monkeying around, is the sheer incoherence of the plot; secondly, there's a crippling inconsistency of tone.
To address the first issue, it's painfully clear that rewrites and re-edits were made with very little consideration to the overall plot. While we're used to early trailers showing somewhat different versions of scenes than those that eventually appear in the final cut, there are scenes with Venom that have completely different dialogue dubbed over them. Some of the scenes, such as the closing moments which see Eddie pop to his local convenience store only to unleash Venom on a thug who's robbing the place, seems to have been moved from much earlier in the film. There are baffling changes in character motivation, with only the slimmest explanation, if any.
To begin with, the film starts out as a fairly earnest sci-fi thriller, with the extraterrestrial symbiotes being used as the basis for new biologically-altering treatments to allow colonisation of other planets. Lead scientist/businessman Carlton Drake is well portrayed by Riz Ahmed, and has a clear motivation, as someone who believes his own hype and whose ambition has overreached his morality. He very quickly descends to become a moustache-twirling villain, though, viciously sending people to their deaths because, well, that's what villains do.
Tom Hardy does everything he can as Eddie Brock, a reporter who is determined to expose corruption and illegal activity regardless of what he's assigned to do. It inevitably bites him in the ass, he loses his job and his fiance and his swanky apartment, dragging him down into apathy and depression. This characterisation, held up by Hardy's performance, is about the only believable element of the film. Hardy convinces both as the swaggering, cocky early version of Eddie, and the broken, isolated version later, giving him a likeable everyman quality in both periods.
A series of unlikely events see the Venom symbiote fuse with Eddie, and unfortunately it's once Venom comes on the scene that things go south. Venom works Eddie like a puppet, except where he's speaking to him and goading him on. Venom's never been the most consistently explained character in comics, and while the final act sees the man and the alien unify into a working duo, there's no consistency concerning how much control Eddie has on his actions. Venom works well when it's a force that emphasises the worst aspects of a person, and can be an antihero that is always on the edge of going too far. Given Eddie's disillusionment in the film, there'd be a lot to work with here, both in his isolation from humanity and his rediscovery of his need to do good. There's no sense of any of that, barring a couple of hastily appended lines to set up a sequel.
The symbiote is also killing Eddie, except when it's suddenly not, for vaguely defined reasons. Drake is possessed by his own symbiote, because the symbiotes can only bond with those they are compatible with, except when the plot needs otherwise. He then moves from moustache-twirling villain to unstoppable killing machine villain, becoming a bigger, nastier version of Venom, and it turns out the symbiotes are now invading. Then Venom decides he likes the Earth and being stuck on Eddie, so he's a good guy now and is going to save the world.
Meanwhile, we have a few supporting characters. Michelle Williams plays Anne Weying, Eddie's fairly unsympathetic ex-fiance. She's surprisingly bad in it, but in all fairness she has very little to work with. There's also a brief moment where she becomes She-Venom (which is basically Venom, but with tits), but this is, thankfully, fleeting. Her new boyfriend is Dan, played by Reid Scott, who's a surgeon and is instrumental in keeping Eddie alive in the bit of the plot when the symbiote is killing him. Pleasingly, there's virtually no rivalry or animosity between them, since they're actually both pretty decent guys who could probably do better than Anne. Jenny Slate is pretty brilliant as Dr. Skirth, a scientist working for Drake who takes a stand against his amoral actions, a character that I'd actually have liked to spend some time with. Unfortunately, she doesn't last long.
I was never quite convinced that Venom could carry a film completely divorced from Spider-Man, since so much of the character depends on their antagonistic relationship, but the set-up used here could work if they'd actually had the guts to go for it. It's pretty clear that early intentions were for an R-rated film, allowing genuine bloodshed and selling the horror side of the concept. Instead, Sony bizarrely opted to make the film a PG-13 (it's rated 15 in the UK), neutering it and leeching most of the power of the concept. Again, you could do a Spider-Man film and introduce the more family-friendly version - this is a kids' cartoon character after all - or you could let rip and make it stand on its own as an adult-oriented superhero film. To start with the latter and then cut the film apart to try to try to make it into the former, in the apparent hope that it could lead to crossovers with Marvel movies in the future, was always doomed to failure.
As it is, we end up with an entertaining but dimwitted mess, that has no clear idea of what kind of film it is or who it's aimed at. By the end, it feels almost like Men in Black, only without the humour. At least Woody Harrelson's cameo as Cletus Kasady has promise.
I like the 2018 movie - it’s a fun depiction of the “anti-hero” trope I love how the movie is about a flawed, but well intentioned “good guy”.
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