I knew this movie would not be good. It was a matter of “how bad will it be?” Honestly, that is a very difficult question to answer. “Venom” is not a good movie. Yet, it has its moments that shine. But those moments are surrounded by a complete misunderstanding of the character Venom and a complete lack of a little important detail in movies called plot.
The first ten minutes of “Venom” are a good indicator of where Sony’s heart was during the production of this film. That place being their wallets. They make several allusions to Spider-Man’s world in a movie where Spider-Man doesn’t exist! The son of J. Jonah Jameson (the angry editor-in-chief of the Daily Bugle newspaper) makes an appearance, and the Daily Globe (the Daily Bugle’s rival) is mentioned for example. But ok, you aren’t a nerd like me. I can hear you saying, “Dalton, I have never once picked up a comic book nor do I intend to. Stop being a nerd and tell me about the movie itself.” Alright, I’ll do that. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Spoilers ahead.
“Venom” starts off showing the main character, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) doing his job as a reporter who attempts to root out corruption and human rights issues. This is an attempt to get you to like Eddie Brock. But then, Eddie does the worst thing he could do, stealing information about the main villain of the film from his lawyer girlfriend’s confidential laptop. He then confronts the main villain, who is an Elon Musk type billionaire/scientist, with this privileged information, even though Brock was specifically told not to rock the boat on this one. As a result, Eddie’s reputation goes down the drain and his girlfriend is fired from her law firm. Which further leads to her breaking off their engagement. Brock winds up in poverty as a result.
So when we cut to Eddie six months later, we are supposed to feel sympathetic for the guy. A guy, which I must stress here, has no one to blame for his problems other than himself. He is not a likable guy. He gets a second chance to take down our main villain (whose name I cannot remember and I refuse to look up because if Sony wanted me to know it they would have tried harder), and he then messes everything up again. Except this time, he gets to bond with the alien symbiote Venom.
Venom takes control of Eddie’s body and begins a bloody rampage through San Francisco, complete with the consumption of police officers. After some boring chase scenes, Venom finally introduces himself to Eddie and tells Eddie that Venom’s species will come down to eat humanity to extinction. But if Eddie cooperates, Venom might let him live.
More boring stuff happens. Then, inexplicably, Venom informs Eddie that Venom wants to stop his boss, another symbiote known as Riot who has bonded with main villain, from bringing the rest of the symbiotes to Earth. Venom only says “you changed my mind” to justify this change of heart. Venom and Eddie have only known each other for at most two days, and this is somehow enough for a carnivorous alien to turn his back on his entire species and culture.
Of course Eddie and Venom succeed, because Sony wants to make a universe around this. This leads to the worst end credit scenes ever in movie history. Eddie interviews an unnamed man in San Quentin Prison, who is wearing the single worst Raggedy Anne Doll wig of all time. Then, the man turns his head and it’s Woody Haralson who says, “I’m gonna get out of here, and there will be Carnage.” Which means my prediction was right, they want Carnage to be the next bad guy. The, this movie has the balls to show an entire scene from the upcoming “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” movie with a tag of “Meanwhile, in another universe…” as a way to one day try and connect Venom with Spider-Man.
I can’t say I hate this movie. I hate the ingenuine place it came from, I hate Sony for being so dumb and predictable with this movie, but the movie itself isn’t bad enough to hate. But I can’t say I like it either. For every decent action scene, there’s a dumb one that looks straight out of a Transformers movie. The more I think about it though, the more I dislike it. So, I’m going to give “Venom” a 4/10, slightly below average. A lot of people are probably going to like this film. I am not one of them.
The Chicken Barn 