Fancy a bin bag drizzled in Creme Egg filling? Thought not
Perhaps the hardest thing to process about Venom is the sheer ugliness of Venom himself. For those unschooled in the history and lore, Venom is a blob-like alien “symbiote” who gives his hosts largely tendril-based superhuman powers, and who was created in the mideighties as a means of jazzing up Marvel’s Spider-man line.
As drawn by Todd Mcfarlane, he was immediately iconic: a mix of all-in wrestler, goblin shark and silverback gorilla, with a smashed piano grin and grasping, Nosferatu claws. In Ruben Fleischer’s film, he is a CGI eyesore that looks like someone drizzled Creme Egg filling on to a bin bag.
Things are made more confusing still by an eccentric performance from Tom Hardy as Venom’s human host, investigative journalist Eddie Brock, whom Hardy plays in a well-meaning but hapless style that suggests Norman Wisdom in the lead role of The Fly.
Around 40 minutes pass before Eddie and Venom are united, another 20 before the titular anti-hero’s fang-fringed visage leers into view. Filling the time beforehand are reams of moody backstory. Some of this involves Michelle Williams’s hadronthin love interest character, and the rest Eddie’s role as the presenter of a San Francisco-based journalism series.
This job brings him into contact with a nefarious Silicon Valley billionaire played by Riz Ahmed, who is convinced that all of humankind’s problems can be solved through forcible cross-breeding with some aliens his outer space research team found on a comet. When Eddie sneaks into the lab one night, the fateful meeting, and melding, of man and symbiote takes place.
Fleischer stages the subsequent action as strings of bangs and jolts, with no sense that anything is happening in a continuous physical space. Venom can be a lively watch, both as a reminder of why Hollywood stopped making superhero films like this, and also for the occasional glimpse of the off-the-wall, star-driven freak-out that might have been. But in terms of basic entertainment, let alone as the foundation of a franchise, it is miserably shaky stuff.