Venom (2018)
★★½ — Venom (2018)
Venom arrived in cinemas in October 2018 as something of a curious proposition: a Marvel Comics adaptation built around one of Spider-Man's most recognisable villains, produced without Spider-Man himself anywhere in sight. Sony Pictures, working through its Marvel Entertainment partnership, had been developing a standalone Venom feature for years, and the finished film represents a conscious attempt to launch a separate universe of Spider-Man-adjacent characters. Whether that was a sound creative decision is, of course, another matter entirely. The film is set in San Francisco and follows Eddie Brock, a disgraced investigative journalist whose career has collapsed around him, who finds himself bonded to an extraterrestrial organism called a symbiote after an encounter with the Life Foundation, a biotech corporation with its own agenda involving the alien creatures. The premise sits somewhere between body-horror and superhero origin story, which is either an interesting tension or a structural problem depending on your tolerance for tonal inconsistency.
Behind the camera is Ruben Fleischer, a director probably best known to audiences for his work on Zombieland (2009) and its sequel Zombieland: Double Tap (2019), films that managed to blend genre ingredients with a fairly confident comic touch. Venom is a rather different beast in terms of scale and studio expectation, produced under the Marvel Entertainment banner alongside Pascal Pictures and Matt Tolmach Productions, with a budget that placed it firmly in blockbuster territory. The source material draws on the Eddie Brock version of Venom from Marvel Comics, a character who has been a fan favourite since his debut in the late 1980s and who carries a built-in following that Sony was clearly hoping to activate. The screenplay went through several writers and revisions, and that stop-start development history is not entirely invisible on screen.
The cast is, on paper at least, a polished but unremarkable collection of reliable talents. Tom Hardy takes the lead as Eddie Brock, a role that demanded physical commitment and a certain willingness to look genuinely unhinged (both of which Hardy has demonstrated before, as anyone who has seen him in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) or The Dark Knight Rises (2012) will attest). Michelle Williams plays Anne Weying, Brock's former partner, a role that asks considerably less of her than her abilities would suggest. Riz Ahmed takes on Carlton Drake, the film's principal antagonist, a billionaire scientist with an obsessive interest in symbiote biology, while Scott Haze and Reid Scott fill out the supporting cast in roles that serve the plot more than they illuminate it.
Tom Hardy as a journalist bonded to an alien symbiote should be more fun than it is but Venom never quite lives up to its chaotic potential. It’s loud, it’s messy, and it tries desperately to be edgy, but ends up feeling like a watered-down superhero film stuck between tones. Is it a horror? A comedy? A dark action thriller? It can’t decide, so it settles for being none of them properly. The result is just average, another mid-tier entry in the ever-expanding, increasingly tired superhero slog. Hardy, as ever, commits fully, talking to himself, shifting accents mid-sentence, and bouncing off walls like a man possessed. There’s a strange charm in his chemistry with the gooey, wisecracking Venom (also Hardy, via voice), and the film leans into the odd-couple dynamic with some genuinely funny moments. But the plot is paper-thin, the villain underdeveloped, and the action is a blur of CGI darkness where you can barely see what’s happening. It’s all so dimly lit and chaotically shot that the big set pieces feel weightless. It’s not offensive, just forgettable. No real stakes, no emotional depth, and nothing to say about power, identity or responsibility that hasn’t been done better elsewhere. It’s superhero slosh, glossy, noisy, and instantly disposable. Worth a watch if you’re bored and fancy something loud, but don’t expect anything more than Hardy doing his best with a script that never fires on all cylinders. Solidly mediocre.
If I'm honest, the whole thing left me a bit cold in the way that only a film with genuine potential can. There's something almost frustrating about watching Hardy throw himself into a role with that kind of energy, only to find the material around him consistently letting him down. The odd-couple dynamic between Brock and the symbiote is the one element that genuinely sparks, and you can see the bones of a scrappier, stranger film in there somewhere, one that might have leaned harder into the comedy or the horror rather than hedging its bets on both. As it stands, Venom is a film that mistakes noise for momentum and CGI mayhem for genuine spectacle. Fun enough on a quiet evening, perhaps, but not one I'll find myself thinking about come morning.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2018 | Watched: 2025-08-17
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Venom (2018) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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