Film Review - Venom (2018)

Venom is based off of the villain from the Spider-Man comics and this time Tom Hardy stars as Eddie Brock an investigative journalist who is living with his girlfriend Annie (Michelle Williams) and is assigned to interview the head of the Life Corporation (Riz Ahmed) but when he pushes on allegations of bad behaviour he is fired from his job but one night a mysterious substance enters his body and unbeknownst to him gives him great power.

Venom was a movie that before I saw it I thought it would be great or it would be horrible and instead it is only ok nothing great but nothing horrible either, the film works best when Tom Hardy who is easy to understand this time after so many movies where no cared who he was unless he put on the mask is playing Eddie Brock the journalist someone who has a bit of a reputation that like in the Spider-Man animated series from the 90s conflicts with his superiors will go to any lengths to get his story, when those scenes were playing I was interested.

But when the Venom symbiote shows up and takes over the movie it becomes very cartoonish and at times it literally feels like a live action cartoon with the Symbiote CG effects having that very animated feel and it also doesn’t help that the storytelling starts to develop this dual identity of going from a serious investigative journalism story with this evil company (and Mr Ahmed is good in his scenes) to a cartoon with people flying everywhere and the predictable action scenes and climax and payback of the early scenes.

And its not that those scenes are bad certainly not but they just feel very disengaging and I just sat there kind of a bit bored by it all but not like with the new Predator movie where I just began to hate what I was watching but just feeling very eh and meh about it all and when you have a film like Split by M. Night Shyamalan from last year that did this kind of anti hero film so well this feels very very bland in comparison.

But hey at least Venom is done and we have Glass to look forward at the end of January next year and frankly watch Split instead of this movie, 2 out of 5.