Venom: Let's stop pretending Tom Hardy isn't terrible

If you are a fan of Spider-Man, perhaps you are familiar with this character. A symbiote comes back from outer space and bonds to Peter Parker’s professional rival Eddie Brock. Eddie changes from his human form into the super strong, cannibalistic creature Venom. His battles with Spider-Man are shockingly competitive even though all logic tells you Venom could rip Spidey in half. It’s like those years Wake Forest was beating Florida State.

Anyway, the Venom of this movie is a sort of a riff on that Venom. There is no Spider-Man in this universe. Eddie Brock (played horribly by Tom Hardy) is a journalist, but he is less of a newspaper man and more of a hybrid. He’s part in-your-face Vice News bro and part citizen journalist out to expose the deep state ties that allow Taco Bell to secretly rig American elections. The truth is out there, man! Think outside the bun!

He also has an accent that isn’t quite New York and it isn’t quite Chicago. It is just a generic melding of American stupid. Eddie Brock, like Tom Hardy’s portrayal of Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, is mostly defined by this dumb vocal tick. It doesn’t sound like anything you would hear in real life. It falls somewhere on the spectrum between King of the Hill recurring character Jimmy Wichard and that scene in the donut shop from Wayne’s World where Garth is making his donut (Mr. Donut Head Man) talk.

So Brock is living with his girlfriend, who is a corporate attorney for The Life Foundation, which is a shady company run by a shady dude that is into everything from pharmaceuticals to space travel. His name is Carlton Drake (Rogue One’s Riz Ahmed), but it might as well be Schmelon Schmusk or Beff Jezos.

Eddie finds some information on his girlfriend Anne’s (Michelle Williams) computer about participants in trials for drugs created by The Life Foundation who have died. He decides to confront Drake in what is supposed to be a friendly interview. Drake gets him fired.

We’re still a long way from seeing our monster at this point, so let’s just say that one thing leads to another and bing bang boom, Brock becomes Venom.

There is so much that is so hacky about this movie. The Life Foundation headquarters act as something of a haunted house through part of the film, and there is a literal scene where Brock is driving towards it at night and we hear a wolf howl. The only thing missing is Drake himself opening the door with his face half-hidden behind a cape.

Once you get through the trudging nature of the first quarter of the movie, there is some fun stuff hiding in Venom. Our first glimpses of Eddie transforming into the monster provide some funky visuals that evoke Pee Wee’s Big Adventure’s Large Marge. This happens during a memorable confrontation with a noisy neighbor.

A car chase sequence that sees Eddie transform back and forth between his human form and the symbiote is a little hokey, but leans into the stupidity enough to give a sort of wink and nod to its audience. Yeah it’s kinda poorly written, but you came to a movie about a superhero monster that eats people’s heads. You were never going to get Lawrence of Arabia.

Sony has billed Venom as being Marvel Comics’ first foray into horror movies, and I have to be honest. I just don’t see it. Sure, we’re dealing with a monster, but Venom is void of any suspense or creepy twists that would make it anything more than you might think it is by watching the 2 minute trailer.

It takes too long to get to everything that makes Venom fun and interesting, and unfortunately it all fades too quickly. The resolution almost feels like the result of someone saying “Jeez, we’re already an hour and forty minutes into this thing? Just shoehorn in a Stan Lee cameo (which are getting less and less charming, by the way) and let’s call it a day.”

Visually there is some neat stuff here. It isn’t anything you haven’t seen before, but the effects are at least fun to look at. That is more than you can say for Venom’s script, but big, loud, dumb and full of murder is kind of par for the course for most of the superhero genre outside of the MCU, so I guess you can’t really be disappointed.