directed by Ruben Fleischer
written by Jeff Pinkner, Scott Rosenberg and Kelly Marcel
Sony Pictures unleashes the first of its "Spider-Man-related-characters Cinematic Universe" which, conspicuously, is Spider-Man free, featuring the character of Venom, which, originally conceived as a Spidey villain, is now forced to be its own thing. Fortunately, the finished product is nowhere near the disaster that so many film critics are making it out to be.
Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is an investigative journalist who specializes in fighting for the oppressed and bringing down corrupt bad guys. He's got it all: his own show on a news network, and a beautiful, upwardly mobile lawyer fiancee Anne (Michelle Williams). When Eddie's boss asks him to do a "puff piece" interview with industrialist Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), head of the Life Foundation, whom Eddie strongly believes to be involved in dirty dealings, he grudgingly agrees. After stumbling onto a confidential e-mail on Anne's laptop, implicating Drake in some truly horrific acts, Eddie takes matters into his own hands during the interview, with disastrous results. Both Eddie and Anne lose their jobs, Eddie loses Anne, and meanwhile, Drake's nefarious experiments, which involve bonding alien organisms with human hosts, continue, even as one such body-snatching alien which crashed in Malaysia on one of Drake's ill-fated expeditions makes its way to the Life Foundation, possessing and discarding human hosts as it goes.
Months later, Eddie is approached by one of Drake's scientists (Jenny Slate) whose conscience can no longer bear the things she's witnessed, and she tells him about the experiments. She then sneaks him into the Life Foundation, where Eddie, in an attempt to rescue a homeless woman he's befriended, finds himself hosting one of the aliens himself. On the run from Drake and his goons, Eddie finds himself with superhuman abilities, but at the same time saddled with an ornery, perpetually hungry alien organism named Venom. Will Venom enable Eddie to take down the corrupt, murderous Drake, or will he be the death of him?
Unlike many of the Marvel Comics characters whose film adaptations I have diligently followed over the years, I have no emotional investment in the character of Venom. I read his first few appearances thirty years ago in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man, back when Todd McFarlane was still drawing the book, but when McFarlane left, so did I, and as a result, I wasn't around for Venom's mutation from a straight-up villain into an antihero, or the "Lethal Protector" that made him such a cult favorite. In short, I didn't really expect a whole lot from this movie when I learned that it wouldn't have anything to do with Spider-Man, though with each casting announcement (it's got two Oscar nominees, for a start) I found myself more and more intrigued.
When I wrote my review for Avengers: Infinity War, one aspect of the film I critiqued was the tonal shifting throughout the film, which, to date, is the darkest of all the films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I basically said that, in the hands of lesser filmmakers, such shifts wouldn't work. Well, as unlikely as this may seem to fans of the entertaining Zombieland, Ruben Fleischer is that lesser filmmaker, unfortunately, as are his team of writers, which include Scott Rosenberg, whose finest written work remains to be his scathing "everybody knew" confession regarding Harvey Weinstein.
Fleischer structures his film as a sort of superhero/horror hybrid. Unlike his comics counterpart, Eddie Brock is introduced as a sympathetic character, a crusader for the oppressed and Drake is set up as the villain. As a superhero film, it's barely even mediocre, with cringe-inducing dialogue and both a poorly-realized protagonist and antagonist. For a seasoned investigative journalist, Eddie comes across as amateurish at best, and thoroughly incompetent at worst and his fall from grace feels more like a plot contrivance than anything else as do a lot of other conveniently overlooked details like how easy it is to sneak into Drake's supposedly state-of-the-art facility.
When Eddie finds himself joined to the symbiote, however, the movie changes quite radically in tone...and, to my mind, in quality. Almost all pretense of being a "serious" superhero saga is dropped, and the movie, led by Hardy, who not only plays Eddie but lends his filtered voice to the symbiote as well, embraces its own goofiness to spectacular effect. It's an almost straight-up action comedy at this point, just under halfway through the movie, and the film is immensely the better for it. Hardy is so effective in selling this aspect of the movie that even when the obligatory generic CGI action kicks in, the film still chugs along to its reasonably satisfying conclusion and even its tease for the (now inevitable) sequel. I read somewhere that Fleischer pushed for the film to be serious, while Hardy advocated the comedic approach, and the conflict kind of shows. While I appreciate that Hardy seems to have won out in the end, I wish the film had not taken quite so long to get where it needed to be.
Some people have given Sony grief for not making this an "R" rated film, but to my mind, this was actually a good call; constraining the writers by depriving them of "f" bombs and the kind of toilet humor that the Deadpool movies gleefully plundered actually enabled them to instill the movie with its own distinct humorous sensibility rather than churn out a Deadpool knockoff. Some of the older writers have compared this movie to Carl Reiner's body-sharing 1984 comedy All of Me, in which Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin share the former's body, and having seen that movie on TV many times, I have to say the comparison is spot on, with Hardy doing a commendable job channeling Martin's energy. He does a very good job carrying this film, which would have been dreadful without him.
Michelle Williams, to be fair, also deserves kudos for breathing life into an otherwise generic "significant other" role, including some of the film's humorous moments. When her new doctor-boyfriend (Reid Scott, also okay in his role), professes to be a fan of Eddie's, marveling at the people he's taken down, Anne says, without missing a beat, "I was one of them," and the humor of that scene, at a time when the film hadn't quite kicked into its humorous mode, worked for me.
Unfortunately, beyond Hardy, Williams, and to a lesser extent, Scott, the rest of the cast just doesn't really measure up. To be fair to Riz Ahmed, who can add Elon Musk to the venture capitalists he's parodied (he did a bit of Mark Zuckerberg in Jason Bourne some years ago) he does his level best try to sell Drake as a truly detestable bad guy, but the script just doesn't meet him halfway. Also, the less said of Jenny Slate, a comedienne stuck in a comedy with literally nothing funny to say or do, the better.
The CGI and action sequences were pretty much par for the course for one of these films. They weren't terrible, but they weren't great either. I had a laugh-out-loud moment during one intense fight scene between Venom and a bunch of armed men when one of his victims let out the infamous "Wilhelm" scream, but other than that felt distinctly unmoved.
Of course, as with any Marvel-based movie, even one not made by Marvel itself, there will be post-credit goodies, and fans of both Venom and Fleischer's previous work are in for a treat with the mid-credits sequence, which also serves as a teaser for the sequel. The real reward, however, is the glorious three (or so) minute clip of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse that plays after the end credits are done. That was definitely worth sitting through the entire credits to see.
6/10
