Review: Venom is a great bad movie

Let’s get this out-of-the-way right at the top — Venom is not a great movie. It’s not even the best movie to feature Venom (that title rests with the unfairly maligned Spider-Man 3). Yet for all of this film’s flaws, Venom‘s manic energy hits a certain blockbuster sweet spot that we haven’t really seen since the 90’s, an era when studios would dump out strange and often bewildering action / sci-fi films like Anaconda or Spawn, movies that seemed tailor-made for drunk (or high) late-night crowds. That seems to be the vibe director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) is going for here, and taken in that context this perplexing movie starts to make a bit more sense.

For those who didn’t grow up hoarding Marvel comics in the 90’s, Venom is one of Spider-Man’s greatest villains, a slinky alien presence known as a “symbiote” that takes over the body and mind of whichever host it grabs onto, driving them mad with its ultra-violent impulses. The creature most famously inhabited the body of Eddie Brock, a gruff journalist from New York, played here by Tom Hardy as a quirky video journalist and activist, a sort of jacked-up Michael Moore with a stereotypical “I’m walking here!” Noo Yawk accent.

Venom opens up with a shot of deep space (the same opening as Shane Black’s recent Predator, another insane sci-fi blockbuster that would serve as a perfect double feature), where we see a spaceship crash-landing onto Earth, letting a gooey, black symbiote break free. The ship was sent into space by The Life Foundation, led by an Elon Musk-like Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), a wealthy industrialist who has a nefarious plan (as they do) to meld the symbiotes with human hosts, to allow humans to live in space (or vice versa). In order to pursue the tests, Drake’s corporation has been experimenting on the homeless and mentally ill, a practice Brock learns about through a guilt-racked whistleblower (the underused Jenny Slate). While breaking into Drake’s labs for an expose, a symbiote breaks free and bonds with Brock, granting him super-human strength and a loud, gruff voice in his head, eagerly egging him on to do things like eat garbage and maim people.

While hiding out from Drake’s minions and trying to expose the hidden experiments at Life’s labs, Brock is also attempting to resurrect his relationship with his ex-girlfriend Anne Weying (Michelle Williams), who works for a company affiliated with The Life Corporation. When Brock snoops though her e-mail and finds a secret memo detailing settlements between Life and victims of its projects, Brock confronts Drake during an interview, resulting in both Eddie and Anne being fired from their respective jobs.

From that point on Venom is essentially a buddy movie, with Hardy playing both roles at full tilt, showcasing some impressive physical work and some great comic timing. Whether the comedy works for you is a different story. There is some undeniable comic hi-jinx, like Hardy (in his human Brock form) jumping into a lobster tank at a high-end restaurant and chowing down on a live lobster, but the unrelenting inner-dialogue between Brock and Venom takes some getting used to, with the interplay between the meek Eddie and the laughably gruff Venom playing out like an updated take on Little Shop of Horrors.

In addition to thrashing around enemies like rag dolls, Venom also plays a sort of relationship counsellor to Eddie, delivering him constant (unsolicited) advice in an effort to reunite him with Anne. Those scenes are some of the best in the film, giving Hardy the chance to turn on his bumbling charm as Eddie tries to mend his relationship. Michelle Williams isn’t given much to do as she begins to process what’s happening to Eddie, but just her presence in the movie elevates a fairly paper-thin character into something more substantial. 

At heart Venom is a fairly ridiculous character, a notion this film wholly embraces. Venom even admits to Brock that he was “a bit of a loser” on his home planet, which explains his over-the-top bro attitude, like calling Brock a “pussy” for refusing to jump off a high-rise building. If that sort of exchange sounds like comic gold to you, then Venom should be right up your alley. For all its cringe-worthy, WTF-moments, Venom still feels like a refreshing take on the superhero genre given how cookie-cutter even the best of the Marvel films have been. Say what you will about Venom, but this film is taking chances — some work, and some fail spectacularly, but this movie moves, and remains entertaining throughout its thankfully less than two-hour running time. It’s loud, brash, and fairly stupid, but its offbeat humour and out-there lead performance basically guarantees that Venom will join the ranks of the best bad movies out there.