There are parts of this film that are an absolute delight to watch and then there are parts that absolutely ruin it. Venom works best when it is focused on the relationship between Venom ( an alien from outer space ) and Eddie ( Tom Hardy ), their interactions with each other are fantastic and funny, the alien backstory is kinda cool and the fight sequences are satisfying. Everything else doesn’t work well at all or is shabby at best.
The story revolves around the operations of Carlton Drake, head of the Life Foundation, who is an evil mad-genius that was somehow able to bring alien symbiotic creatures onto the Earth. Drake is looking to fuse both alien and human together so that we can take advantage of the other specie’s abilities. He uses homeless people down on their luck as “volunteers” for this transfusion, but many of their bodies are found to be incompatible, take a wild guess at whose body will work. Eddie is a journalist, which in in the film is not very believable, who likes to expose evil corporations, like Drake’s.
The backstory to how Venom gets inside Eddie is pathetic, much of it doesn’t make sense because a lot of the major plot points are brushed off or rushed. Eddie’s girlfriend, goes from wanting to marry him in one scene to dumping him in a another, it’s almost as if the writers (all 4 of them) didn’t care about this relationship because every bit of it is unbelievable and thin. You would think that such a shaky relationship once tossed aside would stay there but the writers keep bringing her back and each time it just gets worse and worse. It’s really a shame because it would take me out of the scenes that were really good in this film.
Where this film shines is in the interaction between Eddie and Venom. That we have to go through 40 minutes of preposterous plotting is not great, but when we’re there this movie really does take up a world of its own. The CGI of Venom is fantastic, it scuries along all over the place, going up the walls and into the skins of it’s host, it’s errie and sent chills down my spine. Their conversations with each other and the relationship they develop is what I enjoyed the most.
Tom Hardy gives it his all in every role I’ve seen this man in, he never fails to impress and even here he is in top form, unfortunately everyone else in the film is quite bad, even Michelle Williams and Riz Ahmed, who are both extremely talented actors, suffer here from bad writing and characterizations. Ruben Fletcher, the director, known best for Zombieland and GangsterSquad, doesn’t really come up to par either, scene after scene is badly misjudged, especially those in the 1st half of the film that deal with character development. The action scenes though are well done, they give you what you want and it’s a lot of fun to watch, especially the last fight scene between 2 aliens under a rocket ship.
Venom owes alot to Hardy, the visual effects team, and the relationship built between Eddie and Venom, it’s just a shame that everything else brings this down because it really could have been quite a good film.
