REVIEW: Venom (2018)

Venom (2018) is a superhero movie produced by Sony based on the character from the Marvel comics. It takes place in a different universe than what we know as the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). It stars Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock, a journalist dead set on ending the treachery of the bioengineering corporation know as Life Foundation ran by Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed).

A spaceship carrying extraterrestrial symbolic lifeforms crash lands and the Life Foundation secure and transports the lifeforms back to their research facility in San Francisco. Soon after realizing the potential of the lifeforms, Drake begins human trials of attempting to bond the symbiote and humans together.  After some mistrials, one of Drakes scientist, Dora Skirth, becomes uncomfortable with methods and seeks out of Brock to bring down Drake. A failed attempt leaves Eddie and his found symbiote bonded together.

I want to start off by saying, if you are a comic book fan then you should put your comic brain away because there is basically no real comic portrayals in this movie other than some character names and maybe some similar attributes. Also if you are like me, it is really hard to get past the fact that Spider-Man isn’t even in this universe, let alone this movie which makes a lot of things hard to grasp.

Tom Hardy’s performance as Eddie Brock isn’t bad, but what Sony was trying to do with Eddie Brock as a character just felt off. They turned him into this sympathetic guy that is down on his luck and you want to root for. I know over the years there have been many new iterations of Venom, but whatever Sony was attempting to do in this one falls flat.

Once the comic side of you is put to the side and you just look at Venom (2018) as a whole it has it’s moments and can be enjoyable at times. The beginning drags on for a while and the plot is pretty inconsistent for the most part. This movie also suffers from not going with the R-rating and instead choosing a PG-13 rating. Some of the moments where the tone is quite dark and almost from a more brutal horror genre, switch back to this light-heartedness with quips and jokes. This also leads to some of the dialog and jokes just failing pretty bad, leaving you not knowing why you’re laughing.

The whole tone of the movie is just very confusing and inconsistent because it wants to be more than just an MCU movie, but it didn’t want to lean all the way into this brutal dark tone that Venom is known for like a Deadpool or even Upgrade.

The actual use of CGI for the Venom and the symbiotes themselves isn’t amazing but wasn’t the worst I have seen over the past year.  One of the main upsides to the movie is Riz Ahmed’s character, or at least until the third act. He’s the charismatic scientist, which is a villain type with speeches that he nails.

Overall Venom (2018) has plenty of issues,  most stemming from the PG-13 rating which just throws the tone, dialog, and even the action scenes into tailspins. There definitely was potential there for a great movie, but it was just so inconsistent in everything aspect. I think what really hurts this movie, however, is that is called Venom and is supposed to be a part of the Marvel comics. If you were to change the name to say ‘Prototype‘ – which this movie really reminded me of – I believe it could have had quite better results.

Today with all the comic book movies and movie universes I just don’t think you can take a character that is intertwined with another character (Spider-Man) and have him not be apart of it.

Venom (2018) is available on streaming and VOD.