BRUTAL: Sony’s Venom receives a multitude of negative reviews for a half-baked script and butchering the fan-favorite symbiote.
By Micah Pierce, Staff Writer
Venom kicks off introducing investigative journalist Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) with a beautiful fiancée and a very high-paying and influential career. His life takes a violent turn for the worse when he is assigned to do a puff piece on Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), a deranged yet wealthy and beloved tech magnate. When Brock deviates from his script and ventures into dangerous territory by questioning Drake about wrongful death lawsuits against his company, he is immediately thrown out of Drake’s building. The next day, Brock is fired from his job and is left by his fiancée. From that point on, he swears to never again affiliate himself with Carlton Drake, but is inevitably pulled back in when Dr. Dora Skirth (Jenny Slate), a scientist for Drake’s company, comes to Brock as a whistleblower. Everything escalates from there when Brock inadvertently bonds with an alien symbiote, an organism that requires a host to survive in Earth’s atmosphere, known as Venom. Brock eventually finds himself battling another, more powerful symbiote and host, in order to stop the invasion of Earth by millions of symbiotes.
Everything about Venom screams potential for a great movie, but a number of factors hold the film back. One glaring problem with the movie is the absence of Spider-Man. The wall-crawler plays a key role in Eddie Brock’s symbiosis as Venom, and the movie reboots the entire origin of the character, leaving loyal comic fans with a bitter taste in their mouths. Not only is Venom’s entire origin completely changed, Venom himself vacillates between the vicious monster he is in the comics and simply a comedic voice in Eddie’s head. There’s nothing wrong with either of these roles as long as the writers pick one, yet they conflict with each other too much. Another major hindrance is the movie’s PG-13 rating. When news came out about Sony’s adaptation of Venom, the hulking beast whose diet consists of brain matter and chocolate, everybody expected an R rating. What could have been an amazingly gut-wrenching and gory movie is instead transformed into Venom, proving to be a letdown in this aspect.
Despite all of the problems with the film’s script and characters, one aspect of the film does shine through: Hardy’s performance. As Brock goes through the highs and lows of his life, Hardy successfully catches both of those extremes and proves to be extremely entertaining running around San Francisco with an alien symbiote riding backseat. Every single one of Brock’s strange facial tics and quaint mannerisms are produced wonderfully by Hardy.
No amount of first-rate performances could bolster the inherently flawed writing of Venom. The film is consistently bogged down by its lack of both Spider-Man and an R rating. Venom is the kind of comic book movie that people who hate comic book movies cite as their evidence, jumping from one plot point to the next with little regard for logic or its characters. Despite the film raking in a high profit, that’s really all Sony’s Venom is: a lackadaisical and carelessly thrown together film created solely for money.