“Venom” is a Truly Terrible Movie
By Rob LoAlbo
Photos courtesy Sony
It looked like a home run on paper with all of the needed elements for a killer Marvel movie: Oscar caliber actors, the director of Zombieland (a great mix of horror, action, and deadpan physical comedy itself), and a beloved superhero property that had been maligned in a past movie and was ripe for a reboot (Spider-Man 3, whose problems seem so quaint by comparison).
Take those movie elements and plug them into Google translate, then take that translation and plug it back in again into another language translator into a completely different language, and that’s what you get here: a tonally inconsistent, nonsensical, craftless, joyless mess. Thanks Sony. This is not a comic book movie as made by auteur director or visionary storyteller: this is decision-making by unanimous corporate boardroom suits where blandness and concession takes top prize. Like the banner that hangs in Office Space that asks its workers, “Is This Good For the Company?,” Venom’s milquetoast flavoring (where if a character or scene doesn’t contribute to the whole to the floor it goes) is good for Sony only if it sticks to the company line. What we get as a result is a patchwork quilt stitched by a madman.
Beginning in the middle of things, an (ironically) corporate-funded returning spacecraft crashes to earth with alien samples in tow, for mission reasons that are never entirely clear. The recently Oscar-robbed Riz Ahmed heads an Elon Musk-like company and plans to create alien-human hybrids for...reasons? He’s been pulling unwitting homeless people off the street to find a suitable host for his alien goop, but they all keep dying. To most, the result would indicate that the idea isn’t a good one to begin with, but movie’s gotta movie.
Hard-hitting investigative journalist Eddie Brock (played by the usually reliable Tom Hardy channeling Steve Martin’s All of Me, minus the fun) is a rebel, shown in that he owns a motorcycle. He takes no guff from anyone, so of course he sabotages his interview with Ahmed’s Carlton Drake within seconds of it beginning. (If he’s such a great journalist, shouldn’t he have led with some relationship building questions? And why would his boss think the interview would have gone in a different direction, anyway?) The movie works so quickly to two-dimensionalize Brock that it’s amazing you can see him when he turns sideways.
Brock’s firing apparently spirals him completely out of journalistic orbit, as no one wants to hire anyone who asks the “tough” questions (because I guess that’s frowned upon in the news). His love life in shambles, he’s now a loner with nothing to lose, a setup for him becoming the hero we (don’t) need.
And that’s one of the film’s major problems: everything we experience is setup for what’s coming next. Eddie briefly conversing with a homeless woman on the street? That’s setup for seeing her in the lab later. Eddie spys a money shakedown in the local bodega? That’s a setup for revenge at the end. Eddie freaks out at the loud music from his neighbor? Better believe that it’s a setup for a joke to come. With all this rigidness in structure, there’s no room to build character, develop thematic content, or establish tone and voice.
Why the rush? It’s runtime clocks in at a mere hour and thirty-two minutes, so it’s not like they were short on time. And that the movie is followed by NINETEEN MINUTES of credits and two post-credits scenes that are clearly there for the studio to set up other franchises and future installments. (One touts a Venom sequel - God help us, and the other previews a scene from the then upcoming Into the Spider-Verse, a movie that has NOTHING to do with Venom.) There’s nothing desperate sounding about those clips. Who needs Marvel Studios, right? RIGHT?!? (Quiet, frantic panting.)
You really feel bad for the actors, too. Michelle Williams, who was so effectively devastating in Manchester by the Sea looks truly miserable as she’s given so little to do but react to Hardy’s hamfisted mugging (improvisation that apparently director Reuben Fleischer was not pleased with). Jenny Slate as Drake’s put-upon assistant has seen better days with Obvious Child, which I want to remind you is a comedy about ABORTION.
When Venom finally does show up, we are almost an hour into the film, which is past the halfway mark. But time seems to be irrelevant throughout. Brock breaks into the lab in the middle of the night and moments later as he’s escaping in daylight. He’s out late drinking and moments later he’s cold-calling employers for work (who’s open at that hour?). His ex has already rebounded just a few months later and moved in with him (the very lost and usually funny Reid Scott who is given such insightful lines like “It’s worse than I thought...I’ve never seen anything like it”).
But Reid’s not alone in the bad dialogue department:
“For a smart guy, you really are a dumbass.”
“How you doing, Eddie?”, “Ah, aches and pains, you know, aches and pains.”
“Life hurts Eddie. It just does.”
“Our names will be spoken long after we are dust. History starts now. This is day one.”
“You know what they say: science never sleeps.”
These are actual exchanges in the movie that take up actual run time.
These are not actual characters either but one-and-a-half dimensional stereotypes with muddled motivations who spout trite purposeless dialogue. It’s wince-inducing banter that lacks any and all cleverness or real emotion. We only feel something because ominous music tells us we should, which only reveals how poorly crafted and misguided the film is, too.
Muddled and dark, the cinematography seems an afterthought. Effects look like they were done on Microsoft Paint, and actors’ gazes don’t quite match up to where CGI characters’ eyes are. Action scenes are so hard to follow with no clear sense of place or direction with editing that cuts, cuts, cuts: only making you think things are fast but there’s a big difference between choreographed and frenetic. Action scene motivations get confused (one has him trying to get away from the bad guys where he then immediately refuses to leave in the next sequence - pick a direction!), and we are left just as clueless.
Nonsensical in nature, real world rules don’t apply either. An army of drones fly through San Francisco daylight blowing up cars and no one sees anything or suspects anyone rich and nefarious. Drake kills all of the people who so loyally work for him right before the big showdown and just after he prepares a launch sequence in record time.
If there’s something nice to be said about this film, it’s in Hardy’s performance as Venom, as he provides the voice of the titular creature. It’s a great mix of character and dark humor, but it’s not even close enough when it comes to saving this movie.
One wonders if there was a slightly better version on the cutting room floor, as rumors of an R-rated version permeated production, but given the egregious and frequent lapses in quality and good-judgement for what passes for a script, it’s hard to believe that any amount of studio meddling would have sunk it more than it already sank itself.
And this week we were blessed (cursed?) with the preview for the sequel, where Woody Harrelson enters a scene chewing contest with Hardy. With a change in director to the limitedly experienced Andy Serkis, could that movie have less of a chance?
So, let this be your warning to steer far and clear of this corporate swill, which miraculously managed to ensnare enough to the domestic tune of $213 million. Why? Maybe we were starved for entertainment. Maybe the Marvel label has more power than we give it credit for. Maybe, like Phil Connors in Groundhog Day says, “You know, people like blood sausage, too. People are morons.”
Star City Rating: 1 out of 5