I went into ‘Venom’ with low expectations and about 20 minutes into this film I realized I set them too high. I often walk away from films disappointed, but rarely angry. ‘Venom’ is everything wrong about Hollywood Studios and Directors who try to make movies in a genre they are not inherently fans of. Only a true comic fanboy(girl) understands what makes comics magic and even then they have a difficult time trying to translate that magic to the big screen. Marvel has making great superhero films so down to a science that we forget that it is not the norm. ‘Venom’ proves that not every comic character is meant for the big screen and just because it’s a superhero movie doesn’t mean it’s going to be a hit. This film is a train wreck from beginning to end and it pains me to say that as Tom Hardy and Michelle Williams are two of the best actors out there today. The fault lies entirely in the vision, direction, and Studio oversight.
WARNING: Boring behind the scenes stuff: As comic nerds know, Sony Pictures owns the movie rights to Spider-man and all of it’s related characters, not the über-successful Marvel Studios. Sony, in trying to capture a piece of the current Marvel super-hero money train, is trying to create their own inter-connected universe around Spider-Man characters..a Spider-verse if you will. Venom is probably Spider-man’s most popular arch-nemesis and the Studio sought to bring the anti-hero to the screen as the first non-Spider-man centric film in the franchise. ‘Venom’ is a painful exercise in genericism where CGI is used to the point of exhaustion over a good story line. I’ve read a few reviews where they try to say something positive like “it’s so bad, it’s good”. No! It’s just bad. In the comics, Venom was created during the legendary run of Todd MacFarlane on ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ series. At the time, MacFarlane and his character Venom helped breathe new life in what had become a stale series. However, Venom worked uniquely with MacFarlane’s art and story telling style. Afterwards, most other artists and writers never seemed to capture what MacFarlane brought to life. It seems that it is even more difficult to bring the vision on Venom to the big screen.
The general story line is about an investigative reporter named Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) who uncovers a secret plot by the Elon Muskish mega-billionaire type Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) to bring alien life forms to earth in order to use them to save the human race. The evil twist is that these aliens are ‘symbiotes’: Creatures who need to bond with a human host in order to survive. The symbiosis grants the human host super human-powers and, in-effect, an evil internal voice. Again, everything about this is just so generic. Even Eddie’s ex-girlfriend Anne, is a complete waste of the Oscar level talent of Michelle Williams. Relegated mostly to the side-lines, I wondered why she was even in the movie. Every step of the movie plot is predictable and just an excuse to provide some cheap laughs or the next video game style CGI effect. It’s a shame because the English actor Tom Hardy mimics an impressive New York accent, but his character is so manic and over the top, it’s hard to form any type of connection with him. He achieves a level of over-acting that would shame William Shatner. The plot jumps around so illogically that it was hard to keep track of what is going on. One moment Venom is here to lead an alien invasion of the earth, the next he decides to protect humanity from his kind for no apparent reason. The logic of Carlton Drake’s scheme was equally scattered and it didn’t help that Riz Ahmed delivered his lines with all the passion of someone reading off a cue card.
From a comic nerd point of view, it was weird that Spider-man was never once mentioned. If this is supposed to expand the Sony Spider-verse wouldn’t even a mention be helpful (possibly a brief cameo)? In the comics, the reason Venom looks like a macabre version of Spider-man is that Spider-man was Venom’s first host so he adopted his features. Here, the Venom symbiotic looks a little like Spider-Man but with no explanation why. I understand you have to be a comic nerd to be frustrated by that, but Hey! We’re the core audience. I guess what I found most disappointing is that for people who hate Comic book based movies, this validates every one of their reasons for despising them. I have no counter argument if this is the film used to judge. If you are a Studio Exec or a Director and you didn’t love comic books growing up, then pass off the project to someone else because you won’t be making a successful, or even a respectable, movie.
Given that there wasn’t even a moment that I was entertained, and in fact, felt a swell of bitterness grow while watching Venom, I am going to give this film an unprecedented zero stars. And “No!”, I won’t even grade it on the ‘it’s so bad, it’s good’ scale.
Zero Stars
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