Venom (2018): Did you Even Try?

01 Jan 0000

Score

I give Venom (2018) one failed to meet expectations out of already incredibly low starting expectations.

Review

The problem with Venom is that the writer, director, and casting director are all horrendous at their jobs. The movie is terrible as a normal movie and as a superhero movie (I despise that we need to make this qualification nowadays). I’m not even a big super hero movie hater. Vemon’s writing, plot, acting, the final product, they’re all subpar.

Writing

Let’s talk about writing first: It’s childish. Here’s a scene with Hardy and his gf sitting in a restaurant being lovey-dovey.

gf

Less talking and more kissing * Kisses him *

Hardy

All right, check please!

This is unironically one of the best quips in Venom. The only good dialogues in the whole movie are the short half-conversations between Venom and Hardy. However the terrible director failed to pick up on this so they’re criminally underused and show up too late in the movie to have any conceivable chance saving it.

The supposed super-genius, multimillionaire, shady scientist, businessman, super-villain (criminally underused trope), Comes off as a NPC’s take on a particularly talkative but not too eloquent environmentalist. This is almost certainly 100% what happened. The writer stole some quotes from the guy handing out “save the trees” pamphlets on the corner of the street but couldn’t remember them verbatim so he fudged it a bit. The writer then inserted these randomly throughout the script whenever his villain character was on screen. There are MULTIPLE points in the movie where Drake gives a random monologue totally unrelated to both his goals and the events currently taking place to a person he kills soon thereafter.

Plot

The characters of course have no motivations that are important to the plot besides Hardy’s overwrought revenge-boner for Drake. The big bad is a random symbiote (gooey alien parasite thing) with the grand plan of flying a ship to the symbiote home comet and bringing a bunch of her (canonically a “he” in the movie, but the alien model looks distinctly feminine) species back to Earth to eat and destroy all human life. Venom, another one of the same species of symbiote, doesn’t want this to take place. Well he apparently does at first; there’s a throwaway where Venom tells Hardy that they have to go steal Drake’s space ship and fly to the symbiote home comet, but this literally never comes up again. By 20 minutes before the end of the movie Venom has grown so attached to Hardy that he would hate for anything bad to happen to him like his planet getting destroyed or something. So Venom and the big bad evil symbiote (who travelled half way around the globe to merge with Drake who spends all his waking time in close proximity to the rest of the earthbound symbiotes) are at odds because of Hardy’s great subconscious persuasive power. God forbid we would have a final fight without overused, un-followable CGI. This is a super hero movie so Mr. good symbiote wins and Hardy teaches him to “only eat the bad guys”.

I mean it has to be ironic. A movie this bad has to be bad on purpose because why else would they include the line, “only eat the bad guys”? They spend multiple minutes of screen time building up to this line. Multiple extra minutes of your life wasted so you can be graced by the illustrious Tom Hardy saying, “Only eat the bad guys!”

“ONLY EAT THE BAD GUYS!!!!!”

I was going to say a bunch of stuff about the poor casting decisions and how Hardy should not be tasked to play an awkward loser character when he looks like the most successful guy in the room every scene. At this point it’s hardly necessary. I don’t think different actors could have saved this movie unless one of them could get the writer and director to change some major parts of it.

What’s Good?

The best part of the movie is the dynamic between Hardy and Venom. Their relationship is genuinely fun and well-designed if at times poorly written and sadly underused. The best action scenes also rely on the interplay between human and symbiote. Venom enhances parts of Hardy’s body where needed and takes minor motor control to avoid immediate danger. Venom’s a symbiote, he’s supposed to be at his best when working hand in hand with his host. However after their first extended fight as a couple Venom decides that things would be best if he did all the heavy lifting while Hardy watches.

If Hardy and Venom met much earlier and spent more time goofing off doing anti-hero things unrelated to the main plot before the story really got underway I think the movie would be greatly improved. Then Venom’s turnaround and betrayal of his species would make more sense and really shine as a humanizing moment for the symbiote. It would have been interesting to see Hardy truly transition from a determined reporter to a deadbeat loser and then to a new man awed, inspired, and a little taken aback by the power he wields and shares.

Conclusion

This review was much more critical in the earlier stages of development but as I’ve gone back over the movie in my mind I can truly see what little good is in it. I still can’t recommend it in good faith; Venom is a pointedly poor film in an ocean of bad movies. What I can do is say that my time with Venom wasn’t totally wasted, but if I could get those few hours back I would take them in a heartbeat.