Antidote needed for ‘Venom’
England’s Tom Hardy works very hard but to little effect in Marvel’s “Venom,” an old-fashioned monster movie that feels strangely weightless. Hardy’s Eddie Brock is introduced sleepily in bed as his lover Anne Weying (a miscast Michelle Williams) goes off to her lawyering.
Brock is an online celebrity, an investigative reporter, but he’s one of those journos the movies love because he does stupid stuff.
Assigned to do a puff piece on industrialist Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed, “The Sisters Brothers”), Brock, who has sneaked into Anne’s computer and knows about Drake’s dirty deeds, goes confrontational and soon moans, “Overnight I lost my job, my relationship.”
Well, yes, when you destroy your lover’s career and your own without any kind of actual investigation, you look idiotic, not courageous.
Brock then, virtually overnight, begins acting — and boy, does Hardy “act”! — like a brain-addled, punch-drunk fighter, one of those homeless people on the street who talk to themselves as people go out of their way to avoid them.
Simultaneously, one of Drake’s spaceships has crash landed and one of the alien beings he’s caught to study has escaped. The alien is a Symbiote — a fast-moving black, pointy jelly mass that needs a human host.
Usually the Symbiote kills its host, as Drake immediately discovers when he does reprehensible human experiments on homeless “volunteers” he’s somehow recruited.
Jenny Slate’s Dr. Dora Skirth heads this lab. Naturally, she knows what they’re doing is crazy bad, a Nazi-style experiment, but she has kids and Drake is scary crazy. Like most everyone else in “Venom,” Dr. Dora is dense and clueless.
When Brock finally is host to a Symbiote, he transforms into a 12-foot, shiny-black scary monster with enormous pointed teeth (see “It” for similarly ugly incisors) who occasionally bites off a man’s head. This is the “Venom” of the title.
The Symbiote also talks to Brock in what sounds vaguely like an English accent, as in “Lew-ZAHR!” for Loser. This comical duo
gives “Venom” its (irregularly) beating heart.
Amid the carnage, highspeed chases and thumpthump-thumping endless fights, it’s this odd-couple humor that works best.
And yes, Marvel mainstays, Stan Lee at 95 makes a welcome cameo appearance.