Venom

Essentially, a terrible mess but with a fairly high dose of fun. The “guilty pleasure” label fits it to perfection. (2018.11.29)

Everything good about this movie is actually thanks to Tom Hardy. This Marvel movie would have ended up in the abyss of history without Tom Hardy and nobody would have ever remembered it. In this way, however, it’s a decent introduction of a new character of the Marvel universe, but it pays brutally for the naïve screenplay. While I accepted the fact that Venom is actually a distant cousin of the Goa'ulds from Stargate SG-1, I really struggled with accepting the simplicity of the screenplay, according to which the tired and disappointed Tom Hardy meets with his buddy Venom. Riz Ahmed isn’t a completely dignified adversary for Venom either; he’s rather an easy ticket into our world, which he surprisingly grew to like. Being a crazy scientist is quite a popular topic which doesn’t get old easily. What could get old are the typical tropes Marvel is already full of. Thankfully, Venom is strong because of Tom Hardy and even Venom himself understood that. And at least because of that I have a reason to look forward to the next installment. (2018.10.08)

Tom Hardy has a problem, an alien parasite has attached itself to him and wants to start eating people, but there are some worse monsters out there, so Eddie Brock and Venom decide to join forces and become the most ordinary of superheroes. Venom manages to adapt a potentially interesting and darker character into a jaded hero who looks like a relic of the past and could have captured the attention of maybe twelve years ago. I don't really know what to praise about it, even the best elements of it are mediocre at best. (2018.10.05)

Hardy would be funny even if he played a used roll of toilet paper. This is true even in a film that is written and composed as cumbersomely as Venom. Something is being prepared for a very long time and quite illogically, then everything is revealed and resolved very quickly. The disobedient film works thanks to Hardy's charm. But it is on pretty thin ice. (2019.10.24)

Venom is getting a lot of hate so far, because critics on RottenTomatoes gave it an average rating of only 4.3, but on IMDB it's a rather satisfactory 7.0, so again it looks like the audience is mostly satisfied, only the critics are grumbling, but they always do when it's not a sophisticated drama, musical or cheap indie. Personally I wasn't expecting much, but Ruben Fleischer, director of Zombieland and Gangster Squad, has once again pleasantly surprised me. It's a shame it’s not R-rated, but it still looks pretty gritty and dark even without the blood. The opening half hour is slightly slower, but once Tom Hardy meets Venom (the scene in the lab is atmospherically horrific), the film becomes an action adrenaline ride to the end that doesn't let off the gas. Tom Hardy's performance is different than ever before and he's surprisingly very funny, and those who like the guy will like him even more after this. Venom's voice is also great and his looks are perfect. The action is great, even though it often takes place in the dark, it's still suspenseful, gritty enough and with decent cinematography. So my only criticisms are the mediocre villain and the rather underwhelming finale, but I had a great time and that's what comic-book movies are all about. Woody Harrelson as Carnage is going to be awesome. The theater was packed, I hope the film succeeds financially. 75% (2018.10.04)

Sometimes I'm happy to be wrong. And I haven't been so wrong for a long time as when I was proclaiming that Tom Hardy, with his certain type of grim expression, could in no way be a suitable Eddie Brock. But he is not only good in the role of a talkative stubborn person, he is excellent. When combined with the thankfully presented second voice in his head, the comedic potential of the resulting situations, and the imaginative action scenes, Venom is a surprisingly enjoyable bit of entertainment. I would obligatorily send the authors of reviews that qualitatively equate the efforts of the Sony stable with the level of such bombs from the beginning of the century as Elektra or The Punisher to go fetch the DVDs of the aforementioned films and refresh their memory. (2018.10.10)

Hardy looked like a village idiot on the poster, but the poor guy also had to act like one in the film. For the first half of the movie, Brock is just a regular asshole who gets what he deserves and only later gains Hardy’s pleasant nature, which is boosted by a symbiote. The main problem with this film is the screenplay, which is full of holes and lots of the material also got cut out! Lapses in logic, characters with strange motivations and only a few good lines. Luckily, Fleischer concentrated on Venom himself, who is really cool, even though he’s a lot different than in the comic book. Even his baffling heroic behavior doesn’t present any problem. The action is decent, though it's a bit hard to follow – everything blends into the darkness (it must be awful in 3D) – and there’s not enough of it. Michelle Williams’ acting is plain bad and the evil Indian as a twisted variation on Elon Musk doesn’t have any ground to stand on in his transformation. Harlson and his ugly hairstyle are just funny more than anything else. There are too few jokes about eating people. The post-credits scene is asking for a fist to the face. We are not amused; we are disappointed. I want to feed! BEWARE: THIS ISN’T A MARVEL MOVIE, just a character bought from Marvel (and I hope that Sony gives it back soon). (2018.10.10)

One of Marvel's most interesting characters finally made it to the silver screen, but it deserved a better story, a little better execution, and overall better care. Such an entertaining, strong and hard-nosed antihero could have been handled much better than waiting a third of the film, getting to know him a third and then lurking in front of a green screen for a while. Hardy does a decent job in the role of a weird journalist, but his digital counterpart is considerably worse. Boring. 20 minutes in, and you know how it's going to end, and of course there's going to be a final battle, because you usually can't do without that in comic book adaptations these days. So predictable. (2019.01.07)

I would like to say that in places Tom Hardy acts as poorly as Ben Affleck in Daredevil or Edward Norton in The Incredible Hulk, but that wouldn't be true. His performance is much closer to Nicolas Cage in Ghost Rider. In places it’s so bad that it's fun. I really wasn't sure if Hardy was grimacing because it's supposed to be funny, or because it's supposed to be serious (but in doing so, it's just inadvertently funny). The film is not terrible, but it is no gem either. I didn't mind at all, for example, that it didn't splash blood and heads were not flying, I much prefer it when filmmakers work with hints. The action scenes were quite solid (especially the one with the tactical unit) and the villain was also decent. Worse, however, was that everything in Venom seemed terribly hurried, and when the “grand finale" came, I almost didn't recognize it. (2018.10.06)

To begin with, I certainly acknowledge the fury of the viewers who are comic-book fans and have a tendency to whine whenever their favourite hero in a film picks their nose with the wrong hand. The PG13 rating is of course a big punch in the dick of everyone with a long relationship with Venom, and I certainly understand that a buddy comedy doesn’t fit well with horror with a cosmic parasite, but whatever. Fortunately, I was able to accept the fact that this would not be about fate, thick atmosphere and stylish kills, so I dulled my brain and had great fun. I don’t agree at all with the opinions that the beginning is slower than a week at school. On the contrary, the pace is nice, the humour is not toe-curling, Hardy is great from the start and it was nice for a change to see a pure and unpretentious comic-book flick not overwhelmed with CGI sets or dozens of characters. Surely, I could probably point out to the oversimplification of the relationships between the characters or the continuity of the twists (it’s clear that they cut out a lot), but I was all the more impressed that even on this lighter and more straightforward level, the film works just fine, clearly fleshes out the characters' motives and just doesn't bore. The interaction between Venom and Eddie is a prank that the creators deliver well and at the right moments – and a lot of the credit goes to the excellent Hardy, whom I like a bit more now, and honestly I can think of only one other actor who would entertain me so much with his lively performance in every film, Jack Nicholson he’s called (though I don’t want to compare, no way). 70%, and I’m taking down a star after some time, it’s not that well executed and unfortunately, it’s not bad enough to be worthy of a guilty 4*. (2018.10.09)

Following on from conflicting mixed reviews, I didn’t expect much, and in the end, Venom is just sort of OK – which slightly irritates me because this film could have been much better. This is due in part to the limits of a PG-13 certificate, so scenes intended to be gory are either cut so that you can’t see the gore, or made in a ridiculous way of not showing blood (for example, a symbiote turns its limbs into sharp blades, but does not slice up their opponents; instead he throws them on the side). The plot is nothing new – it’s a relatively engaging origin story with, unfortunately, a completely generic and uninteresting villain played by Riz Ahmed. At times, the logic is lost, like when Venom tells Eddie that he was in his head and knows everything about him, but then five minutes later he asks who Anne is. Paradoxically, the film works best as a comedy with Tom Hardy humorously muttering and fooling around, which is a fail if Venom is intended as a darker film – because it isn’t. (2019.01.09)

I've seen worse wastes of budget than Venom, and at the very least I could sadistically enjoy the horrible trap all the participants have fallen into here. Tom Hardy, who tries with all due respect to master the discipline of "ShiaLaBeuf-crafting", Michelle Williams, who absolutely doesn't know what the film wants her to do, are pretty big casualties, but the biggest is director Ruben Fleischer, who tries to squeeze something out of the bare minimum he is actually capable of in a film, with the help of a big budget. You can see an obvious reluctance to start telling the dumbed-down story, so the exposition goes on for a seemingly interminable amount of time, with Tom Hardy moving around the dirty streets in extreme long shots the entire time (because Venom is a street-level Marvel hero like Batman, Spider-Man, Punisher, etc.), seemingly deliberately stalling any advancement of the plot (which the film explains by saying that a successful and famous investigative journalist is unable to get a job in 6 months). Then, once the central entity is introduced, you spend the rest of the film unable to shake the feeling that it’s all the work of a six-year-old. After all, check out the careers of the screenwriters, none of whom are actually writers but merely printing presses squeezing the chosen themes into the necessary essential whole, to be continually revised as needed. You can feel the cluelessness emanating out of the screen from all involved, here made all the more painful in its attempt to be a grown-up, hard-hitting, and ethically controversial comic book adaptation, yet one that no one with any real control over the film is actually interested in. Still, as you can see from the box office, there's no need to make a film that is at all distinctive, you just have to relentlessly tell people it is and they'll just believe it. (2019.01.03)

I had a surprisingly good time. The film worked great as a comedy, but the fact is that I expected something darker and more chilling. Even biting heads off was kind of cute and funny, despite the obvious potential. I would have given a higher rating had the atmosphere been slightly more sinister. By the way, kudos to Batman for doing an excellent job voicing Venom. (2018.12.29)

What does Kevin Feige have to say about this? The worst thing about all of Venom is the fact that in this format even an R rating wouldn't be much of a help. Because even an R rating can't help you much when you have an idiotic script. On the other hand, I can’t deny that it would have been a bit darker and more true to its source, considering the attributes of Venom in the comic book – if it had been rated R. Still, I'm afraid that could only have raised the final impression by maybe 15% at most. A few observations on Hardy's acting: Hardy's still doing his thing and he's good, but he's kind of completely out of character – in short, if you set aside the fact that he's supposed to be playing Venom, his performance is OK – unfortunately, his on-screen delivery is woefully inconsistent with the Venom I experienced in the comic books. I was expecting at least some attempt at a suggestive rendering of the main character's ambivalence, or some believable demonstration of his inner struggle with the lighter side of his personality. All that "suggestive rendering" is represented by wishfully comic infantile dialogue between Venom and Eddie, wtf??? A flame of hope is sparked by the first after-credits sequence, though I can't quite imagine Sony would ever stake a sequel, or even a standalone film, on an R rating. (2018.10.14)

Nothing about this movie works. Either an extreme amount of material got left in the editing room or it’s much simpler than that and Sony just came out with another below-average nonsense. The opening is something so terrible that I’m actually surprised by my patience to watch it all the way through. Riz Ahmed is absolutely unconvincing in the role of a "terrible, crazy visionary" and his being cast in this role is something I cannot fathom, just like the choice of Michelle Williams. You can clearly tell she is not enjoying this in the least and her performance is really pathetic. Tom Hardy may be an excellent actor, but I don’t think anybody can save this mess. The plot makes hardly any sense, and most twists and story shifts have very little to do with logic. While it had amazing potential, the result is pathetic and I don't intend to watch it again. (2018.12.19)