Venom (Review)
Venom Suffers from a PG-13 Rating but Pulls Through Thanks to Tom Hardy.
The thing about Venom is that it’s a total trash movie, but it’s one that I really enjoyed watching. It’s biggest problem is that it wants so badly to be a Marvel movie that it slips into the downfalls we’ve seen time and time again from the studio. Personally, I think Venom would have done better taking some notes from Fox who manages to show just how profitable R-rated comic book movies could be, and Venom is a character that deserves an R-rating. That being said, I was perfectly content to sit and watch every minute of it since the studio managed to fix the dreaded “symbiote” problem from trailers.
Tom Hardy is an actor that you can always count on to elevate a role no matter what he’s given. He was easily the best part of films like The Dark Knight Rises, Dunkirk, and even the series, Peaky Blinders. He manages to do this once more with the character of Eddie Brock, a reporter whose ego is very much tied up with his sense of justice. In the Venom, he pulls double duty bot the Brock and the symbiote that the film is named for. Strangely enough, he manages to create a strange “buddy” cop feel as Brock is forced to try to instill a sense of morality on his terrifying alien parasite. Because of this, he’s a joy to watch as a character that is well known to comic fans as a guy who is more than a little complicated. Hardy very much embarrasses the insanity that comes with a character that hears voices in his head but isn’t exactly crazy. However, there are a few scenes where director Ruben Fleischer pushes this aspect to a point where it’s a bit too goofy for such a dark character.
Some might remember Fleischer as the director of Zombieland, whose writers went on to work on Deadpool and Deadpool 2. That’s probably why there feels like there are so many similarities in the overall tone and humor between these films. The problem is that Fleischer doesn’t have the same amount of freedom with Venom because it’s forced into a PG-13 rating. After the tremendous success of both the Deadpool movies and Logan, one would think that Sony would embrace the necessity to have a hard R rating for Venom, but no such luck for fans. Because of this, a character that literally eats bad guys from time to time doesn’t get a chance to really shine as much as he should. Of course, the fact that Spider-Man and the rest of the MCU aren’t mentioned at all (though they do reference J.Jonah Jameson’s son in the film) doesn’t really help Venom feel like it has a spot with the rest of the superhero movies that have been released this year.
There are more than a few issues with Venom, but I want to take a moment to talk about all the things it does right. The first is that it approaches its hero with a sense of humor. Eddie suddenly finds himself with a co-pilot when it comes to his body and because of that, he ends up having a lot of conversations with himself. In a way, the relationship between Venom and Brock is a lot like the kind you see in buddy cop movie, and it works surprisingly well (even if it is a bit of a gimmick). The second is that it’s an incredible visual spectacle. Like so many other Marvel movies, Venom finds itself with a villain who is basically an evil version of the hero. While it’s hard to tell them apart at times when the hero and villain clash it’s one hell of a throw down. Fleischer adapts some very dynamic camera work to capture his hulking hero at work as he literally throws himself from place to place in incredible displays of strength.
The problem with Venom is that is that it suffers from too many cooks in the kitchen when it comes to the script. The screenplay credits 4 writers from a variety of backgrounds and realizing just how many worked on it, I have to say that it shows. What I mean by that is that Venom very much feels like a film that had a lot of scenes it wanted to fit in and not a lot of ways to tie them all together. In other words, it’s a film that is much more about the destination than the journey and Eddie Brock finds himself thrown into a lot of situations with little to no warning. Because of that not a lot of characters outside of Eddie get a moment to define who they are in the grand scope of this story and that leads to a rather boring bad guy in the end.
Like I said before, Venom is a trash movie. It’s got a lot of problems with its story, characters, even some of the visual effects. However, I’d be more than happy to see it in theaters again. It’s a lot of fun, especially in 3D, and Hardy really proves himself to be an actor worth every penny. More than that though, it sets itself up to be a tremendous franchise, especially if it gets a chance to cross over with Spider-Man (and drop more than one f-bomb with an R-rating). Hardcore comic fans will find themselves disappointed with the adaptation, but casual movie lovers definitely won’t regret catching a matinee of Venom.
