Look, I’ll come clean. I wanted this movie to be bad. Going into it, I was excited for its inevitable missteps, and I’ll tell you why.
Even without seeing the movie, it’s clear how much Venom simply exists as an attempt by Sony Pictures to boost their bargaining power in their partnership-feud with Marvel Studios over Spider-Man (if you don’t know about the current situation on the ownership of Spider-Man’s film rights, read this). The mere concept—a film centered on an iconic Spider-Man antagonist, but with no Spider-Man in it, no reference to Spider-Man, and no introduction to said antagonist in a previous Spider-Man film—reeks of cash-grab and power play. Essentially, Sony knows they can’t make successful Spider-Man movies anymore. That’s why they lent the character back to Marvel Studios to make Spider-Man: Homecoming, which exists in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Iron Man and the gang. But Sony technically still own the rights to the character and all closely associated characters, and they’re going to do whatever they can to profit off of that ownership.
So Venom is Sony saying, “Look Marvel, we can make good Spider-Man-related movies too! Let us make movies that cross over into the MCU like Spider-Man: Homecoming, because our movies will make more money ” Sony’s upcoming slate of Spider-Man villain-centric films are likewise intended to prove Sony is a valuable asset to the team over at Marvel Studios.
But after Venom, Sony looks like an amateur trying to play on a team of all-stars, and the results are entertaining, in all the ways I doubt Sony intended.
Venom is not a good movie in any conventional sense of the word. The plotting and pacing bounce back and forth between lazy and absurd. Character motivations change on a dime and rarely make sense. Most of the dialogue is boring, perfunctory drivel that feels more like something a character has to say than something they would naturally. The acting is unintentionally hilarious at its worst and “fine” at best. The action sequences are poorly shot and edited such that it’s hard to tell what’s going on (though from what I could tell, I wasn’t missing a whole lot). On pretty much all the marks, Venom fails to hit.
All that said, I had a pretty good time with it.
Tom Hardy gives it all with his performance, as usual, though the script doesn’t call for deep emotional arcs or resonant human expression for main character Eddie Brock. Rather, it seems director Ruben Fleischer just told Hardy to act insane, and that he does. Watching Hardy reel from the physical effects of bonding with an alien symbiote monstrosity (the premise of the film, if you were unaware) is as comically hilarious as it is convincingly real. It’s one of the few dynamics in the film that actually seems to succeed in the way that the movie intended. It’s weird, it’s goofy, and it’s the slightest bit horrific. As for the rest of the cast… well, I guess they didn’t have the benefit of playing the goofy guy who gets bonded to a sociopathic monster.
Character motivations and personalities clearly don’t mean anything to the screenwriters at work here (or the Sony suits that meddled in the production, I’m not sure). Nonsensical snap decisions are this film’s idea of character development. Eddie’s fiancée (Michelle Williams) decides, immediately and without consideration, to leave Eddie forever after one of his reckless journalistic stunts costs her her job. That may be fair justification for breaking things off, but she barely has enough time to react to the news before resolutely deciding that their completely happy, fulfilling relationship wasn’t worth it anymore. Of course, even after putting Eddie in his place and firmly stating that she is not interesting in ever having him in her life for any reason, she turns around and risks her life to make sure he’s okay when he starts acting like a madman (even though erratic behavior is kinda why she left him in the first place).
Likewise, the titular sentient symbiote that eventually inhabits Eddie’s body changes its motivations almost every scene. First, it wants to consume people for food and fun, then it wants to go back to outer space where it came from to retrieve its friends and take over Earth. But then, once it’s spent a few quality hours terrorizing Eddie, it decides it “likes him” and they “work well together” and that that’s enough justification to risk its life to stop Riot (the other, slightly more evil symbiote that inhabits the mad scientist antagonist) from launching a rocket back to space to, yes, do the exact same thing that Venom wanted to do in the previous scene: go get his friends to launch an invasion of Earth. Still though, Venom comes in second to Eddie for “least bad” character, simply because he’s kind of funny and weirdly adorable due to his sadistic simple-mindedness.
The lazy narrative decisions and character deliberations don’t even hold up to the quality standards of a Saturday morning children’s cartoon—which you would think would be the absolute baseline for a film attempting to adapt a comic book character for a larger, more “mature” audience. In short, the plot literally just doesn’t make sense. Example: Mad scientist antagonist Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) is remotely pursuing Eddie (on motorcycle) through the streets of San Francisco after Eddie accidentally steals the symbiote from Drake’s labs. His method of stopping Eddie? Kamikaze drones. No, not drones with guns, traps, tasers, rockets, or tranquilizers. Just state-of-the-art, expensive, incredibly fast and maneuverable drones that dive at their target and explode on impact.
And that’s me being nitpicky. Venom is chock-full of more significant, story-breaking non sequiturs; that one just stuck out to me as a shameless excuse to have explosions in a scene, and I felt compelled to talk about it.
Venom is not exactly a “so bad it’s good” movie; it doesn’t quite descend that far into lunacy to deserve such cult praise, and it’s too bogged down by boring, barely functional, personality-absent scenes to really get that kind of street cred. Unfortunately, Venom still largely stuck in that miserable pool of banal, mediocre-to-bad-films that just isn’t really worth the ticket price or the gas to the theater. But it does have its moments of lovable awfulness. I’d say it’s worth watching, if you like entertainingly bad movies, but it’s not one that’s worth paying for. Wait for it to hit Netflix, then grab some friends, maybe some alcohol for good measure, and let the laughs and the groans come in equal measure.