Question: how do you center a story around a conflicted, compelling antihero, cast modern-day greats like Tom Hardy and Michelle Williams and produce two-plus hours of nearly-emotionless torpor?
Answer: you make “Venom,” a non-MCU movie built around the organ-eating Marvel Comics character that feels skewed from the very beginning. Like any half-decent comic-book flick, it has its fair share of adrenaline highs, but the tiniest dose of subtlety would have gone a long way towards curing the problems that relentlessly plague the Spider-Man villain’s solo outing.
Here’s what you can gather from the opening blitz that moves faster than the out-of-control spaceship from the first scene: Tom Hardy is Eddie Brock, a reporter who tells the stories the big-time media execs won’t. He exposes corporate corruption, fights government negligence and stands up for the broken and downtrodden who society has overlooked. Damn, we need more people like him.
Eddie scores his biggest job yet when he interviews Carlton Drake, a sociopath in a suit who runs the Life Foundation and serves as a foil to Hardy’s nosy, truth-chasing journalist. Played by Riz Ahmed, Drake is convinced he can save humans from imminent extinction by bonding them with – wait for it – aliens. To make it seem less scary for the human test subjects, his researchers call the body-snatching amoeboids “symbiotes.”
Drake cuts the interview short when Eddie gets too ambitious with his questions of illegal recruitment and testing of at-risk people. Call it bad timing, but Drake’s media-dodging ways (he utters the now-infamous “fake news” in one line) and denial of criminal allegations against him serve as a painful reminder of the Kavanaugh shit-storm that coincided with the film’s opening weekend.
Ahmed goes for the toned-down psycho approach, but his chances of crafting a compelling villain are soured when Drake combines with Riot (essentially Venom but with swords for arms), at which point it all goes to slimy CGI crap. It really doesn’t help that Ahmed’s character is tied to the done-to-death “evil genetics organization” trope.
Jenny Slate (who deserves better gigs than this) is Dr. Dora Skirth, a Life Foundation researcher who sees the light and tracks down Eddie, hoping he can work his reporting magic and expose Drake’s cruelty. Eddie’s not keen on it, but his people’s-champion instincts get the better of him.
Skirth sneaks Eddie into the Life lab, where Drake keeps his human guinea pigs. During a tussle with one of the crazed human hosts, the symbiote jumps ship and bonds to Eddie, who has a hell of a night wrestling with the creepy voice in his head. The fun doesn’t really start until the symbiote in question makes his grand entrance, but the limp PG-13 rating dashes any hopes we had of watching him rip bad guys limb from limb.
Venom is too cool of a character to be entirely bogged down, though, and the struggle over Eddie’s body makes for some hilariously chaotic action segments, including a banger of a chase scene where Hardy tears up San Francisco on a motorcycle.
Eddie and his new addition (he makes the mistake of calling Venom a parasite) begrudgingly agree to work together and knock Drake off his corrupt pedestal. From there, the integrity of the plot disintegrates, and our hopes of seeing a smartly-directed horror-thriller go up in smoke along with it.
Hardy, realizing the ridiculousness of the situation, hams it up and brings a much-needed spark to the snooze-inducing aesthetic. Best scene: Brock climbs into a fish tank and starts gorging on live lobster while a crowd of diners watches in horror.
But Venom is meant to be a killer, not a comic act, and even Hardy can’t inject any life into the cut-and-paste dialogue that holds the stupidly talented cast back from their full potential.
Even the great Michelle Williams, playing Eddie’s estranged fiancée Anne Weying, falls victim to the personality-sapping disease that seems to have infected the entire supporting ensemble. Who can blame her? The scenes jump and cut like a bad video montage, leaving zero time for any human connection or real sense of peril to develop.
To hear Hardy tell it, the best 40 minutes didn’t make the final cut, something that the eventual Blu-ray release could remedy. But it’s difficult enough slogging through two hours and 20 minutes of “Venom.” With a three-hour supercut, you’d beg for the alien antihero to chomp your head off and put an end to the madness.
Hardy reportedly flipped shit in the middle of filming last year, angered by the incoherence of the script and refusing to do any more scenes until the writers gave it another shot. “Venom” sometimes makes you wish he hadn’t given them a second chance.
Tom Hardy stars in “Venom” as Eddie Brock, a down-on-his-luck journalist who bonds with an alien symbiote and terrorizes the criminal lowlifes of San Francisco.
