Venom follows news reporter Eddie Brock, played by Tom Hardy. After losing his career and his fiancé, Eddie uncovers this substance called a symbiote, a goop that has a mind of its own. When he comes in contact with the symbiote, Venom takes over, and the two must work together to take down an evil man that wants to use the symbiotes for evil purposes because he’s evil and does evil things in an evil way. Will Eddie and Venom be able to work together to bring down this dastardly villain? Will Eddie lose his sanity after being overcome by Venom? Will Sony make a good comic book movie? I won’t answer the first two questions, but I will answer the third one. The answer is no.
To start off positively, I think Tom Hardy was great. Tom Hardy has proven many times how good of an actor he can be, and while his performance as Eddie Brock isn’t his best, he easily has the most charisma and personality of all the actors in the film. And his interactions with Venom make for some of the best parts of the movie. The back and forth between Eddie and Venom were highly entertaining, and their banter contained the funniest dialogue in the entire film. I wish there was more of it, because they made the movie tolerable in the parts in which they occurred. Unfortunately, that’s all the positives I can muster.
While the interactions between Venom and Eddie had some fun writing, the rest of it was terrible. For the most part, the whole script felt like movie dialogue. By that, I mean it’s the kind of dialogue that would only be heard in a movie. Nothing that was said seemed real. Combine that with a predictable story, moments and motivations that made no sense, and many clichés, and we have an uninteresting mess of a movie.
It didn’t help that all the characters were boring. Eddie was only entertaining because of Tom Hardy’s performance, and Venom had a good foundation of a personality, but it wasn’t fully fleshed out. Other than that, every character were completely flimsy. The weakest character is, without question, the villain, played by Riz Ahmed. His character is the generic “evil bad guy,” and the miscast of Ahmed did not help. The story could have been interesting, but with the poor script and characters, it was difficult to be invested in anything that happened.
The action was disappointing. The editing was sloppy, the cinematography was boring to look at, the lighting was either too bright or too dark, and the choreography itself was unimpressive. Plus, there was no way to tell what was truly happening. Every action scene looked like shapes smacking against each other. None of the fights looked clear. It didn’t help that the audio during the action was way too loud and overbearing, particularly the musical score. The score for Venom was some of the most obnoxious music I’ve heard in a movie all year. It was so loud and boisterous, it took me out of the movie multiple times. Every single fight scene in the film was white noise to me. They reminded me of the action scenes in the Transformers franchise, which is not a good sign.
Venom was a massive disappointment. The banter between Eddie and Venom was entertaining, but other than that, the film was dull, tonally inconsistent, and poorly written. It was sloppy in both its story and its presentation, and it resulted in a film that I found quite bad. Now, I realize that while critics are destroying this film, audiences are enjoying it a lot. I can easily see people finding a lot of fun with Venom. For me, however, I was hoping for a lot more, and what I got was not good. If you think you might be interested, then see it, but otherwise, it’s definitely not worth it.
Score: 3/10 (Bad)
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