As the old saying goes, you can’t be everything to everyone. Venom was seemingly made to prove this point. This movie is a goddamn mess that tries to throw in something for every conceivable audience and, as a result, it won’t satisfy anybody. Comic fans will be annoyed by the butchering of the source material and non-comic fans are left with a generic, disjointed clusterfuck. Honestly, though, this movie is also a letdown for anyone that has read the reviews and is expecting a historically bad movie. I’ve seen other reviewers refer to this as a future camp classis or midnight movie. One person even said that this could be the modern Rocky Horror Picture Show. Bullshit. In order to achieve that kind of status, a movie must have heart. Be it good (Rocky Horror) or bad (Troll 2), movies like that have sincerity to them. Venom doesn’t have that. Venom is a product of studio market research. Watching this movie is like reading a long studio note from an executive that has never read a comic, doesn’t give a shit about the material and is just trying to make the movie match the results of a market survey.
To get this out of the way, this movie has nothing to do with Spiderman. Considering that Spidey is vital part of Venom’s origin, that’s pretty amazing. It would be like making a movie about the origin of Frankenstein’s Monster without acknowledging the existence of Dr. Frankenstein. That isn’t a creative choice, either, but instead the consequence of complicated legal deals between Sony/Columbia and Marvel/Disney over the rights to Spiderman. Anyway, this takes place in San Francisco (not New York, presumably to explain why Spiderman takes no interest in any of this) where an evil company has acquired alien parasites (called symbiotes) in an effort to merge them with humans to save mankind. Or destroy it. I don’t fucking know. The villain is the CEO and he’s an almost humorously cliched “evil businessman” type. I don’t even remember his name, so I’m calling him Evil Elon Musk. One of the symbiotes (called Venom) escapes Evil Elon’s lab and bonds with Eddie Brock, a local reporter. Together, Eddie and Venom must stop the incredibly generic evil plot while trying to have enough witty banter to distract you from how boring this is.
My best comparison for this is the Spawn movie from 1997, minus the bitchin’ soundtrack that made that movie worth it. Both films have a gross misunderstanding of their source material, material that should have produced dark, violent, character-driven films. Instead, both films crush their characters with an avalanche of juvenile, misplaced humor and godawful computer effects. The tagline for this movie is “The World has Enough Superheroes,” which is fucking baffling considering this is just a paint-by-numbers superhero movie. That would be bad enough if Venom was actually a superhero, but he isn’t. Venom is a fucking villain. There is no reason to turn him into a hero other than eliminating the need to write an interesting script. Not every goddamn comic book movie has to follow the same formula. This should have been about Eddie struggling to contain an evil within himself. That would have been interesting. I didn’t need all of this bullshit with Evil Elon and his army of drones trying to rule the world. Not only is that a misunderstanding of the material, it’s just fucking lazy.
But what if you don’t know anything about the comics and don’t watch this with any pre-conceived notions about the characters? Well you’re shit out of luck too. The tone of this movie is absolutely schizophrenic. It tries to be a comedy, a character study, an action film, a horror film and a superhero movie and, as a result, it is none of those things. It’s like watching a producer go down a demographic checklist. There are decent moments, sure, but they are always quickly washed away by nonsense. The basic plot and villain are so laughably generic that you could only be engrossed of this is the first comic book movie that you’ve ever seen. The fact that this was cut from an R-rating to a PG-13 is well documented and also obvious when you’re watching the film; anytime Venom kills someone, the camera pulls away so fast that you would think its condom broke. Consequently, there is no punch to any of the violence in the film, but it’s safe enough for the kiddies. Rumor has it that up to 45 minutes were cut from the film, both to tone down the violence and eliminate that character development stuff that gets in the way of the shitty superhero plot. Thanks, Sony. Fucking appreciate it.
The last act (in which Evil Elon is combined with another symbiote called Riot) is a fucking trainwreck of bad computer effects. Ever watch two black blogs of goo fight each other for 20 minutes? I have and I had no idea what the fuck was happening. Also, can we please get away from the trope of the villain simply being the evil version of the hero? I mean, really, other than Iron Man, Incredible Hulk, Thor, Ant Man, Dr. Strange and Black Panther, this is the first fucking time that I’ve seen that in a comic movie. For fuck’s sake, make more interesting villains. Before this movie, I got the trailers for Aquaman and Captain Marvel. The Aquaman villain is, you guessed it, basically just an evil version of Aquaman. I don’t know who the villain is in Captain Marvel, but I wouldn’t be shocked if it’s just a brunette in a darker Captain Marvel suit with the same powers as her. I’ve fucking had it with this shit.
I will say one nice thing about this movie: Tom Hardy and Michelle Williams are great in it. They are both really trying and have some legitimately nice dramatic moments between them. Too bad those moments are always broken up by some computer-generated explosion, but they aren’t phoning it in. They should join Amy Adams in a support group for great actors slumming it in shitty comic book movies.
I love comic books. I’ve read comic books my entire life. But I just can’t take this anymore. I feel like I see a dozen of these movies a year now and I can barely tell the difference at this point. I’m fine with ones that do something different. I had Logan as the best movie of 2017, after all. But for every great one (Logan) or good one (Wonder Woman), I get six shitty ones that are just repeating the same fucking crap on auto-pilot to have a big opening weekend at the box office and then get played on repeat on TNT in two years. This isn’t for comic book fans, it isn’t for non-comic fans, it isn’t even for fans of bad movies. This is for fucking nobody.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venom_(2018_film)#/media/File:Venom_(2018_film_poster).png
