VENOM Review

While the MCU’s adaptation of Spider-Man is going strong, Sony Picture’s Avi Arad's (who produced all of the previous Spidey films) passion project has always been a Venom spin-off. Originally pitched back in 2007 as a follow-up to Spider-Man 3 (2007), the film was set to follow Venom on his own, much to the detriment of the film’s plot and characters.

Now, in 2018, we have finally received Venom (2018) in all it’s disappointingly bad glory. Following Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) as he tries to uncover a secret project that rich mogul Colton Drake (Riz Ahmed), much to the detriment of his career and fiancé Anne Weying (Michelle Williams). So when Eddie acquires the Symbiote, he must fight against Colton’s tyranny and literally save the world from an impending symbiote attack.

The reason Venom (2018) doesn’t work for me is it’s unabashed disregard for its source material. It continuously hints at greater ideas and subject matters, but barely even cares to explore them. Even our main character is barely fleshed out, and the only real glimpses we see at his previous endeavors is through short news clips that don’t show enough to make you genuinely care for him.

Even in its portrayal of Venom is mediocre at best. The suit and voice are incredible but the cringe tastic actions of the titular character made me completely lose interest in it’s goal. In fact, I’d even go as far as comparing this to B-movies from the 80’s — it has the cheesiness, the hokey villain, and a badly acted main character.

The most unfortunate part is the fact that the film completely wasted all the talent that they had at their disposal. When you are making a stand-alone comic book film with a cast like this, it should be a given that it’s good. But, similar to The Amazing Spider-Man series, it appears that Sony interrupted the filmmaking process and pushed an agenda on the filmmakers.

The only small ray of hope in this entire film is the semi-interesting action in the third act. The symbiote looks great (with some genuinely great CG) and the idea of a symbiote vs a symbiote is pretty cool, so it makes for a interesting enough battle.

Overall, Venom (2018) is a disinteresting, disappointing mess, that further proves that Marvel needs to have control of Spider-Man for the foreseeable future.

Final Score: 1 out of 10.

Venom • Run time 1:52 • Rated PG-13 - for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for language