Venom Review

It’s not terrible.

No, seriously, it was much better than I was expecting! Admittedly, that was a low bar but I was actually entertained and it had some moments of genuine delight. It’s really important that those of you who are fans of the Venom from the comics temper your expectations, this isn’t the Venom story that you’ve seen before and if you go into the film hoping to see anything approximating comic book canon you’re going to have a bad time.

The biggest challenge in the film is staying awake for the first half-hour. I thought the movie treated Eddie Brock, (Venom’s human half) in a way that was pretty true to the comic book character. A disgraced member of the Fourth Estate who just can’t get his act together. Tom Hardy plays Eddie like he’s channeling Bobcat Goldthwait but at least he never sounds like Bane. He has the obligatory love interest, Anne (Michelle Williams) but the real joy of the movie comes from his interactions with the Symbiote. There are some real laugh-out-loud moments that I would love to see more of.

I’m not going to go through a blow-by-blow recount of the plot but, while I enjoyed it, I can see why the movie’s Rotten Tomatoes score is so low. It was not great as a story because the pacing and structure were deficient. Just like your High School English teacher marked you down on your essay for all the boring grammar and structure errors you made in your otherwise inspired essay: “Why the Drinking Age Should be 15” Venom has some well done bits that aren’t crafted together particularly well but it does leave me hoping to see a sequel.