Venom was always a great villain in the cartoon series, it was my opening the to story of the black space goo and with every version, apart from the god awful Spiderman 3 outing, He was always a firm favorite. So when they announced a solo Venom movie I was both excited and apprehensive as it was made very clear from the start that this wasn’t going to include our webslinging friend and will have a very different story to tell.
If you are unaware of the origin story of the symbiotic costume, It was originally known to have attached itself to Peter Parker during the Secret Wars event after Peter uses it to fix his torn costume, leading to the fan favorite Black Spiderman suit. We have recently found out that the Venom life-form attached itself to Deadpool, leading to many thinking that that is the reason for it’s psychotic behavior. This suit started to turn Peter crazy and during an epic comic scene he manages to rid himself of the goo but it lands right into the lap of Eddie Brock, on f many to take on the Venom mantle.
The film however takes out the origin and gives us a Venom who attaches itself to Eddie without the addition of the Spiderman powers, this is very confusing though as the only reason Venom looks the way he does, I.E the eyes of the costume, is because the Symbiote is connected to Spiderman and takes aspects of the Spiderman Costume. You don’t get the logo of his chest but you do get the eyes. However let us look at this film as a film fan rather than a comic book fan, as a lot of people will not have really been privy to Venom in the past.
So the film focuses on reporter Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy – MAD MAX FURY ROAD, THE DARK KNIGHT), he has a great life with his Lawyer fiance Anne (Michelle Williams – I FEEL PRETTY, THE GREATEST SHOWMAN) he was a highly popular news program and all he is looking for is a way to make peoples lives better. After an ambush interview with shady business tycoon Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed – THE NIGHT OF, ROUGE ONE) goes badly Brock finds himself breaking into Drake’s underground lab where he is using living alien Symbiotes on homeless people to try and attach the to the right host. Well one finds the right host, as the Venom Symbiote merges with Eddie, protecting him from the on coming forces Drake has sent to retrieve and eat some heads as well. The unlikely duo must find a way to stop Drake but what they do not know is a missing Symbiote named Riot is also looking for a host to destroy the earth and take it for the symbiotic race.
This is a film of two halves, firstly I love Hardy as Brock, the partnership between Eddie and Venom was both funny and engaging throughout, however on the second half of it the story was thin, the villain wasn’t much of an imposing force (using whisper evil oooooooo) and the supporting cast were flat throughout. The action was good, I love the Venom wanted to eat the heads of his victims, I loved the chase scenes and I like what they have done with Venom's character so as a Character I would really wanted to see what a different writer/director could do with it, especially after seeing the end credit scene.
As a whole the film was well shot with a great leading character, but it lacks that little something. Even if you had a cameo by Tom Holland’s Spiderman in a second end credit scene or even a mention of the rumored Silver and Black film just something the break away from the utter dullness of everything else around it. You could of had Silver Sable hunting him down or, again, an end credit scene with Black Cat but alas no. I also think it really needed to be an 18 rating or a very close to it 15 rating. Venom needed to be that little bit more violent than it ended up being and it is a shame to see that Sony wasn’t willing to push it as far as Fox is trying to do with Deadpool and the x-men universe.
It is an okay start to the Sony Not Spiderman but kind of Spiderman Universe. Do I personally think you could have released this next year and connected it to Avengers 4? Yes I do as it would have been so cool to see Peter get the suit in Avengers 4, use it in Homecoming 2 then let it lead to an end credit scene in Homecoming 2 where Eddie gets the suit and then Venom later in 2019…..but that is just me. Overall it is the type of film you can watch, enjoy and not worry about again. I just hope the do something good with Venom 2.