Venom (2018)

Tom Hardy as a journalist who gets taken over by a foul-mouthed, flesh-hungry alien symbiote sounds like the setup for something genuinely mad and brilliant. And yet somehow, Venom manages to squander that premise at almost every turn. It's not bad enough to be entertaining in a train-wreck kind of way, and it's not good enough to be satisfying. It just sort of... exists, loud and glossy and gone from your head the moment the credits roll.

The identity crisis at the heart of this film is its biggest problem. Is it horror? There are flickers of body-horror nastiness that suggest it wanted to go somewhere dark and uncomfortable. Is it a comedy? Some of the banter between Eddie Brock and his alien lodger genuinely made me laugh. Is it a straight action thriller? The set pieces would have you believe so, if only you could see what was happening in them. The trouble is it never commits to any of those directions. It hedges every bet, sands every edge, and winds up being none of those things properly. You're left with a film that feels like it was assembled by a committee terrified of alienating anyone, and in trying to please everybody, it pleases nobody all that much.

Hardy, to his enormous credit, gives this everything he has. Watching him talk to himself, wrestle with his own reflection, dive into a restaurant lobster tank in front of horrified diners, and shift accents mid-sentence is a genuine treat. The odd-couple dynamic between Eddie and Venom is where the film finds its best moments, and when it leans into that weirdness, there's a scrappy, funny energy that briefly suggests what the whole thing could have been. Hardy is doing the work of three people and carrying this film on his back, which makes it all the more frustrating that the script gives him so little to work with. The villain is barely a character, the plot is paper-thin, and the supposed emotional stakes never land because we've not been given enough reason to care.

The action is where it really falls apart for me. It's all so dimly lit and so chaotically edited that the big sequences feel weightless. Two blobs of CGI goo thrashing against each other in near-darkness is not exactly pulse-racing stuff. Compare that to something like Mad Max: Fury Road, where every action beat is spatially coherent and viscerally felt, and you start to understand just how much craft goes into making chaos readable on screen. Venom doesn't have that craft, at least not in its action sequences.

There's also nothing particularly interesting going on beneath the surface. Questions of identity, of what it means to share your body and your mind with something else, of power and responsibility, are all sitting right there waiting to be explored. The film glances at them and moves on. It's superhero slosh, competently produced and instantly disposable, the cinematic equivalent of a bag of crisps you've eaten before you've even noticed you were hungry.

I've sat through films in this genre that are far worse, and I've reviewed my share of mid-tier blockbusters that coast on charm and spectacle without saying much. This reminds me a little of Men in Black: International, another film with a charismatic lead doing his best with a script that never fires properly. Same sense of a missed opportunity, same hollow feeling when it's over.

Two and a half stars. Worth a watch on a slow evening if you fancy something noisy and undemanding. Hardy alone earns it a pass. Just don't go in expecting anything more than that, because this film has no intention of giving you anything more than that.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2018  | Watched: 2025-08-17

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