'Venom' A Review

Venom is a superhero action movie, the lead character a spin-off from the Spider-Man comics featured on the big screen first in 2007's Spider-Man 3. Eddie Brock(Tom Hardy) is an investigative reporter who stumbles upon secret experiments going on in the Life Foundation headed by the pervertedly altruistic Carlton Drake(Riz Ahmed). Eddie bonds with an alien organism (the titular Venom) providing him with superhuman abilities and all hell breaks loose!

Other than Hardy's performance not much is surprising or out of the now well-worn tropes of superhero movies but its different enough to excite and entertain. Hardy plays Brock as a periodic badass but mostly a cowardly panicked buffoon. Hardy gets to execute some serious slapstick when Brock and Venom battle for control of the body and Hardy gets to go full on Nicolas Cage crazy with the bizarre buddy routine he does with Venom. Unfortunately this absurd and surprisingly delightful performance is smack in the middle of a relatively pedestrian comic book movie with the necessary rainy action scene, mustache twirling villain, underutilized female supporting character(hope Michelle Williams got a fat check), and the classic boring the-villain-is-a-literal-version-of-the-hero we saw in he first half dozen Marvel movies.

Visually serviceable but unimaginative and with a score that is distinctly out of place and an overall tone that is, to put it generously inconsistent, the only real reason to watch the movie is for Hardy's performance. If the movie tonally followed his lead it would have been a more unique and more entertaining experience.

Stream It.