Venom | 2 out of 4 Stars | Rated PG-13
By Kyle Osborne
For my money, Tom Hardy is as interesting an actor as anyone currently in the business. He works economically, his performances are well-calibrated with charisma that burns through the lens- even when he’s not saying a word.
‘Venom’, the latest Marvel movie (I honestly don’t know if that means it was in a comic book, and it totally doesn’t matter) arrives with no small amount of anticipation, and it may well satisfy the built-in fan base, but the rest of us will have to settle for Hardy’s good nature and a few, just a few, laughs. Even the always cinematic San Francisco can’t disguise that the rest of this flick is just a noisy version of a hoary storyline.
Hardy plays Eddie Brock, a sort of TV street reporter who has what you’d call the “City beat.” An interview with a powerful owner of a bioengineering company (Riz Ahmed) goes wrong and leads to him getting canned. Plus, his girlfriend, played by an also slumming Michelle Williams, dumps him. I mean, could anything else go wrong for the poor guy? Glad you asked.
So, it turns out that the bioengineering baron is blending some blobby type of space alien with actual human beings against their will–specifically, homeless people, leading to horrific deaths of his “test subjects.” When Hardy’s character (long story, don’t ask) finds himself trying to save the day in this evil lab, he ends up becoming a “host” to the blob, known in the movie as a “symbiote.”
Now, with a new found alter-ego, Hardy can kick ass and take names like never before. A version of this concept that played much better was the movie Upgrade, which was released earlier this year. As was the case in that unfairly overlooked film, our hero can hear the voice of the thing that’s living inside him–this leads to some of the aforementioned laughs, and Hardy has the comedic chops to pull it off.
But mostly–noise. Shopworn tropes. Marvel. Blah, blah, blah. The visual effects, a key part of the genre, seem cheesy and cheap.
Stay for the credits if you want to see the sequel teaser. It’s not the worst film you’ll see, but it just feels wholly unnecessary.
Kyle Osborne