'Venom' Review (And Why Do We Knowingly Go to Bad Movies?)

I knew Venom was going to bad, it wasn't Fantastic Four (the Josh Trank abomination) terrible but with the talent involved behind and onscreen it's a huge disappointment. Yet still I went to the cinema and watched a paint-by-the-numbers superhero film that didn't know what type of film it wanted to be or who its audience was.

With the success of Deadpool and Logan, it showed the studios there was a lucrative market for hard R rated adult oriented superhero stories, however watching Venom it was clear Sony didn't know what they wanted to do.

Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer was attached and then the major casting coup that Bane himself Tom Hardy was set to play Venom, add in established Oscar nominee Michelle Williams and rising star Riz Ahmed and you had a cast and creative team to pull it off.

However from day one we suspected there would be issues, whereas Spider-Man: Homecoming was a co-production between Sony & Marvel and part of the larger MCU, how did Venom fit into the picture?

We learned Spiderman would not be seen or mentioned drastically changing the most famous element of Eddie Brocks (soon to become Venom) backstory. Not having Spider-Man feature made sense if they were going for R rated territory and Deadpool territory as Homecoming had lots of younger fans.

The first trailer didn't garner much of a positive reaction from the internet, many popular film podcasts slated the trailer saying it looked like the best superhero movie of 2004. A second trailer followed just before release that again did nothing to dispel the unease that Sony had not got the tone right and misjudged their audience.

A few days before the release Tom Hardy said as much in an interview where he was asked what his favourite scene was and he told the reporter there was "30 or 40 minutes" of his favourite scenes on the cutting room floor. Then we saw the certificate PG 13 in America and a 15 in the UK, right then we largely knew what to expect.

So why did I still go...? I lowered my expectations and my lowered expectations were largely met, if I can dwell on a few positives I can see why Tom Hardy signed on for the role. When he and the Venom symbiote are bantering back and forth and Venom takes control making Brock a puppet it's entertaining. I can see little glimpses of what the director and Hardy were aiming for and what must have attracted Hardy to the project in the first place.

It must be an unwritten rule of cinema that if you set a movie in San Francisco you have to have a car chase at some point, now while Venom's chase scene never comes close to greatness it's perfectly fine and entertaining enough while it lasts... and that's about it for the positives unfortunately.

As mentioned the tone is the film's biggest problem is it horror comedy, action film, drama or superhero film? It fails at all of them. The horror isn't horrific enough, Venom literally bites a bad guy's head off and talks about stacking body parts but he never follows through and when there is a brief moment of ultra violence there is no blood, quick cuts and it's so darkly lit you cannot see anything anyway.

The script is terrible, yet with so many great comic book iterations of Venom we end up with a by the numbers boring film that telegraphs every "surprise" hours before they happen. Hardy really tries his best but the director and the studio needed to go full psycho gonzo with Venom (like Deadpool did) and instead they watered it down to appeal to no one.

If I've neglected to mention the plot it's because it's this simple—Alien parasites come to earth and some are captured by a typically evil scientist. Eddie Brock is a news reporter who loses his job and girlfriend on the same day, eventually he investigates the story that cost him everything. Eddie breaks into the lab gets infected with the parasite and thats already half the movie. Then lots of watered down, badly edited CGI fight scenes before the standard CGI punching CGI finale that all bad superhero films do.

Now let's talk about those post credits stings, firstly we see Eddie back as a reporter interviewing a serial killer which we know as the scene is ripped off from The Silence of the Lambs. And here's Woody Harrelson (yeah I forgot he was in this as well) as Kletus Cassidy better known in the comics as Carnage, again a character ill suited to a PG-13 movie.

The irony here is there would be a good film in Tom Hardy's Venom facing off with Harrelson's serial killer symbiotic Carnage, it could be a more noir detective story with Brock trying to hunt down and stop Carnage and I'd love to see those two actors battle each other onscreen.

However there is very little chance of that, Venom will not be successful enough to green light a sequel and I doubt Hardy would come back to the role. Even if by some miracle Venom was a smash hit, I'm sure Sony would stick to their formula and we'd get another watered down film that pleases neither the hardcore fan or casual film-goer.

Then finally after way too many credits a title pops up "meanwhile in another universe" and we get an extended sequence from Sony's forthcoming "Into the Spiderverse" which already looks a million times more entertaining than Venom. However what I don't understand is trying to link the two films together as they are so widely different in tone and potential audience, its almost like Sony haven't done their research on the properties they own.

On the surface level it makes sense Venom is a antihero/villain from the Spider-Man canon of stories, so why not link the two with a end credits sequence? Well, bloody hell why not? Because "Into the Spiderverse" looks like it is being squarely targeted at kids and Venom is a dark grim 15 certificate mess of a film. The parents who take their kids to see "Into the Spiderverse" will not take them to see Venom, and if you've suffered through the credits to see the Spiderverse sequence you'll wonder like I did, "why are you advertising a kids film at the very end of an adult film that the target audience would likely never see?"

Ah rant over, in short Sony screwed the pooch on this one and Hardy deserved much better, which brings me back to question—why do we knowingly see bad movies? It has to be this innate sense that the reviews could be wrong, if there is a film that I wanted to see but all the reviews are bad I probably won't go. However if there is one review that likes even the smallest element of it I'll go, for this it was 'well Tom Hardy is in it so it can't be that bad and it was directed by the guy from Zombieland which means it can be gory and funny. It was neither.