Review of Venom (2018) by K Nife C — 04 Oct 2018

Was it really necessary to remake Leigh Whannell's Upgrade within the same year? Of course, this is Sony Pictures we're talking about who are lucky if they can avoid butchering a film, much less finish a full cut before release. It makes sense that they would leave all of that heavy lifting (plot, characters, machinations, etc.) to a film where the makers thought of it as anything more than a paycheck. They certainly had the good sense to assemble a fairly good cast (Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Riz Ahmed, and Jenny Slate) which more often than not works in the poor screenplay's favor despite any glaringly apparent internal wincing from these brave (and hopefully well compensated) thespians' auras.

But seriously, if Michelle Williams' character had been murdered this would be the exact same story, beat for beat, as Upgrade. Tom Hardy and Logan Marshall-Green could be siblings, and their respective body inhabitants' dialogue dynamics and physical effects are so close one could easily make the case for direct plagiarism. But I'm not going to argue the point because I'd rather talk about how Venom could easily pick up where Sam Raimi's Spiderman 3 left off had he excised his obligatory blight - the character Venom himself. This movie plays out like a mutated treatment for Spiderman 4, but thankfully Raimi jumped the shark in that last episode so Sony's CG effects team would have a full decade to crap out this.

The film, much like the eponymous anti-hero, is a mixed bag of weird goo, trying to cram an otherwise carefree, Joe-schmoe character, Eddie Brock, into the body of a socially conscious journalist who doesn't have the foresight to separate his private life with his vocation. As a character he's totally likable, so when he does insanely stupid things (like destroy his professional career in one bumbling gaffe or end up in a top secret lab with an alien symbiote) it seems at odds with his otherwise street smart identity. This could easily be accounted for if he had made these brash decisions while under the influence of Venom not unlike Peter Parker's disco dance in Spiderman 3, but since all of these contrived situations have to occur to get to that point the whole thing seems pretty stupid. Raimi was fine with rolling with these contrivances and relished the moment for better or worse, so in that regard, Venom continues Raimi's trend of making tonally inconcise, yet nevertheless entertaining, spandex-man computer cartoons. If you want to see some incomprehensible garbage fly across the screen, there have been longer dumpster fires in the history of the genre than Venom.