“Venom” is the first Sony spinoff film to focus on a Spiderman character, and “Venom” is bad. It tells the story of a group of alien parasites that land on Earth who inhabit human bodies to survive. It is a terrible movie. Everything this movie tries to accomplish, it fails at. The movie is not funny, exciting, gripping or really enjoyable in any way. Tom Hardy stars as investigative journalist Eddie Brock who eventually bonds with the titular Venom entity. Originally planned to be a hard R, the film feels watered down throughout all its action sequences as for box office purposes, it is rated PG-13. The film has almost no redeeming qualities. It seems to be made solely to capitalize on Sony’s ownership of the marvel property as it takes no leaps creatively as it refuses to tread really any new ground in the superhero genre which is seeing more entries than ever. The movie acts at times as if it’s a dark comedy, while other times it tries to provide social commentary on human behavior. The area where the movie suffers the most is the villain (or lack thereof). A good superhero movie needs a good villain, and “Venom” does not have that. Riz Ahmed is the stand-in for the villain in this movie and he brings nothing to the role. The overall writing of the film is poor and while the movie really wants you to like Tom Hardy as the film’s antihero, it’s very hard to. The only parts of the movie that aren’t terrible to sit through are seeing “Venom” in action for the first time and a post credit scene that makes me fear the thought of this film getting a sequel. “Venom” is not a good movie and I could not really recommend it to anyone, even if they are a fan of the comic book source material. The most disturbing thing about “Venom” is the amount of money it has made thus far, which almost guarantees that this type of lazy filmmaking will live on. Hopefully for the fans, Marvel Studios will find a way to get the rights to the rest of their characters back.
Grade: D-
Jacob Hales, Features Writer
