New Marvel film Venom is too tame for the antihero at its heart

Image: courtesy of Sony Pictures

The latest Marvel offshoot is all headache, no sting

Venom opens in cinemas around Beijing today (Friday 9 November), with rather high expectations for box office takings. According to China Daily, online bookings from presale tickets have already raked in a cool 55 million RMB. Since its initial release at the beginning of October, Venom has grossed over 545 million USD worldwide, putting it nicely in the black from the 100 million USD production budget. Yet, despite already reaching tenth place on the highest-grossing films of 2018 list, the film has generally seen negative reviews from critics (including from our pals at Time Out London, below). So what's it really like? Catch it in Beijing this weekend to see for yourself. 

Venom, a slick-skinned alien 'symbiote' who first plagued Marvel’s Peter Parker back in a 1984 issue, has a Wikipedia entry roughly 8,400 words long. That’s not to say that the villain deserves his own film – even a silly one like Venom – or to be played by the jittery but sometimes inspired Tom Hardy of Mad Max: Fury Road and The Revenant. (A similar idea already came to the movies anyway, with 1987’s inventive body-swapper The Hidden.) It only suggests that a lot of people take even the marginalia of comics seriously, so seriously that they might not know when they’re getting shortchanged.

It’s these superfans, not casual cineplexers expecting just another monolithic smackdown, who are going to feel the most crushed as Venom slides off the rails. When exactly does this happen? Is it when you realize that Hardy is going to be using a distracting Squiggy-esque Noo Yawk accent the whole time as Eddie Brock, a hard-charging San Francisco-based investigative journalist? Or when Eddie’s fiancée, Anne (poor Michelle Williams), supposedly a sharp lawyer, dumps him on the street, ring and all, after she gets fired by her Elon Musk-ish billionaire boss Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) after Eddie asks him a few uncomfortable questions about his mysterious labs? 'Have a nice life,' we hear twice in a few minutes, a repetition that just feels like lazy screenwriting.

Trailer via QQ

Nope, the moment when it all slides into accidental comedy comes when the booming voice of the alien (Hardy again, aurally masked as he was with Bane) pipes up in Eddie’s head, calling him a 'pussy' and dragging him like a puppet through awkward, listlessly mounted action scenes tricked up with CGI black goo. As you’re enduring the zillionth Frisco car chase since Bullitt and The Rock, it may dawn on you that Venom is supposed to be a bad guy, an antagonist to Spidey (never mentioned here; legally and in terms of solid craft, this isn’t part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe). Why can’t the movie make him properly dirty? The PG-13 rating seriously hurts. Entertainingly, Hardy lets himself get jerked around, Evil Dead-style, but he’s never enough of a jerk – so much for that journo-snoop backstory – and Venom isn’t vicious enough to justify its own existence.

For more films to see at the cinema this month, hit 'Read more'. 

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