I’ll not bury the lead here: guys, Venom is fine. It’s a movie about Tom Hardy and his relationship with his weird voice, personified by a giant blob monster that wants to make as much of a mess as he can. The movie is clunky and basic, but it knows that it’s not going to change the world. Even though it feels at times overlong, it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Put another way, it’s fun enough that I don’t begrudge it the $6 I paid to see it.Hardy stars as Eddie Brock, an investigative reporter with a chip on his shoulder. Assigned to a puff piece on one-percenter Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), Eddie discovers that Drake’s Life Foundation is preying on vulnerable members of society for shady experimental tests. One such test involves Drake’s acquisition of several symbiotes, gooey space aliens that bond with other lifeforms – and soon one bonds with Eddie, transforming him into the hulking Venom.
The principal thing to get out of the way is that this isn’t a Spider-Man film, and that’s upset a lot of people. But here’s my hot take – I don’t think that Spider-Man would actually fix anything that’s wrong with the film, and anyone who thinks otherwise is actually still sore over the third act of Spider-Man 3 eleven (yes, eleven) years ago. The trouble with putting Spider-Man and Venom in a movie together is that it’s a lot of ground to cover; you’ve got to do Spider-Man’s black costume, Spidey ditching the suit, and Eddie Brock becoming Venom first as a villain before somewhat reforming. But wait, you say, this is why God (or Stan Lee) invented a shared universe, to make this story over the course of a few films! To which I reply, yes, but who has the patience to see that story again, only this time spread out across several years? No, better to try something new, and since superheroes are our modern mythology it’s perfectly fine to reinterpret them every once in a while and try something new.
The first act, as I mentioned above, is somewhat heavyhanded. It’s full of characters who speak their motivation rather than show us, with a villain who’s only evil because he’s evil and rich. Academy Award nominee Michelle Williams, who’s all but admitted she turned up for the paycheck, has very little to do as Brock’s fiancée, a kind of obligatory character who reminds one of the narratively inert love interests from late-90s Batman movies. Indeed, her most interesting scene is quickly brushed aside, in a way that feels very much like the film saying, “No, no, a final setpiece is no place for a lady.” In that vein, the film sweats at each turn in the story, baldly showing the effort needed to pivot from one plotline to the next. Once the film establishes what Drake is up to, for example, it quickly swerves by having one character explain that, actually, never mind, what’s he’s really doing is something more sinister, which requires a bigger setpiece to resolve.
The seams on the film are so readily apparent that it’s a marvel the film works at all. However, what it stitches together is actually quite interesting, governed by the most watchably peculiar performance from Tom Hardy whose dialogue, in a rare departure for Hardy, is rather easy to understand. Hardy makes the peculiar choice to play Eddie Brock like a folksy huckster of a reporter, distracted and fidgety; his Venom voice, on the other hand, is classic Hardy, all snarls and grunts with more digital filter than a Daft Punk greatest hits album. This dichotomy, with Hardy playing both to his strength and at once wildly against type, is riveting, and while most of the movie seems to be phoning it in, Hardy is singlehandedly making the best case for more movies in a Venom Cinematic Universe.
So too is a wildly optimistic mid-credits sequence – optimistic in its swing-for-the-bleachers bid for a sequel co-starring a real surprise. No spoilers, but it’s a moment that led at least one man in my audience to holler incredulously, “Wait, is that [name redacted]?!” But it’s emblematic of the movie writ large – nuts and silly and a little ill-advised, but wholly confident and earnest in a way that I think resonated with $80 million or so worth of moviegoers this weekend. It’s a throwback to a simpler era of comic book movies, which ended without the necessity of a sequel to build the narrative world. Even the Eminem track that plays over the credits, written especially for this movie, feels like a relic of a bygone era. But I won’t deny that the clunky first act reminded me a lot of the equally unwieldy first act of Ant-Man, which ended up being a sleeper hit. I won’t say that Venom is as objectively good as Ant-Man, and I can’t say that I’m in a terrific hurry to see it again, but it’s at least as fun as a pint-sized Ant-Man.
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