Venom proves a joyless slog
I’m not sure anyone other than a handful of wealthy lawyers and a few tragic obsessives really understands the ongoing, unfolding relationship between Columbia, Sony and Marvel any more.
The closest I can get to explaining it to myself is as a custody battle between groups who were never together to start with. Sony still has control or ownership of characters who were originally Marvel property, but some mokopuna are returning to the fold.
Venom falls somewhere in between full custody and weekend visitation rights. The character first appeared as a foe for Spider
Man, and has gone on to be a popular anti-hero, with Eddie Brock – Venom’s human host – a gritty foil to Peter Parker’s eternal boyish optimism.
This film reaches us via Sony, but with some of the trappings of a Marvel film.
Marvel is in the credits, Stan Lee gets a cameo, and the Marvel tradition of post-credit scenes is revived. Sadly though, the one defining characteristic of recent Marvel product is missing. Because
Venom just isn’t particularly good. Tom Hardy looks like a great choice to play the conflicted journalist Brock.
Sooner or later Brock will come into contact with an alien symbiote and gain the power to transform into a pitch-black, shape-shifting and more-or-less demonic superbeing.
When Venom flares into life, especially in the odd-couple dialogue between Hardy and his new identity, it becomes an enjoyable film.
The trouble is, these moments are too few, take too long to arrive and are connected by some interminable and occasionally flat-out clumsy story-telling.
With Michelle Williams and Riz Ahmed next to Hardy filling out the roles of Brock’s ex and the equally inevitable evil scientist foe, you would think there was enough acting firepower on screen to overcome some generic plotting, characterless dialogue and a baggy edit. But no.
While the last third of Venom looks like it belongs in a pretty decent superhero yarn, the journey there has been a mostly joyless slog.
Jokes that would have looked funny on the page are eviscerated on the editors’ bench. And the big set-piece scenes are mostly derivative and not particularly well staged. There is nothing in Venom that even approaches the balletic levels of CGI mayhem that films like Wonder Woman and the various Avengers entries have spoiled us with.
Walking out after the second of the post-credit scenes (I was really hoping for Samuel L Jackson to show up) all I could think of was the 2003 and 2008 Hulk instalments, both of which had all the ingredients a good superhero film needs, but were still mostly forgettable, witless and illtempered messes.
If Sony really does want to keep
Venom for itself, it will have to do better for its troubled adopted son than this.