Wow Venom is a bad film. Seriously, I don't see many films with such a huge budget and major studio support that are as thoroughly poor as this one. The script is bad, the direction is bad, the acting (for the most part) is bad, the CGI is terrible and even the soundtrack is uninspired. It's quite a feat. Yes, before someone has a go at me, Tom Hardy does deliver a brilliant performance and is the one good part of Venom, but he's so idiosyncratic and out of step with every other actor in the piece, that it just clashes with the other mess happening. Even before Eddie Brock encounters the Venom symbiote, Hardy plays the character with odd affectations and overlapping dialog, making him stand out starkly from the much more standard line delivery every other actor is giving. So whilst I'd agree that Tom Hardy is fun to watch in Venom, he does not, and cannot, "save" the film.
Personally, I don't really feel that there is enough of a character to Venom to really carry his own film, let alone franchise, despite his popularity, as his best work remains in being a "dark mirror" to Spider-Man. Given that Venom is, through it's post-credits sequence, placed firmly in the "Spider-Verse" multiverse, meaning there may actually be no Spider-Man with which Venom can contrast. It's like making a film about the Joker in a world without a Batman, sure you can do it, but you're missing a huge chunk of what makes the character interesting and memorable. Speaking of memorable, I cannot recall the name of any character in Venom other than Eddie and Venom, because none of them make any impact. Wait, John Jameson is referenced in the opening with the space shuttle crash, but as he doesn't transform into the Man-Wolf or appear to have found the Moon Gem, I lost interest pretty fast.
What else is there to say about Venom? It exists, isn't good and Tom Hardy is fun to watch flail around. How about Upgrade being a better version of the same concept, or the post-credits tease just being a five minute segment of Into the Spider-Verse like the studio knew that was the winner all along? Before the huge boom in superhero cinema, this would have been the end of it, like Spawn or Green Lantern before him, Venom had a bad film and it would have gone away. However, because of a rabid internet fanbase and the fact everyone actually paid money to see this for some reason, we now have a whole Venom "series" to enjoy for years to come. Plenty more of this drab and uninspired take on an, at best, semi-interesting character rolling our way soon, like a turd in the wind. Because that was such a great line apparently.
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