‘Venom’ is an old-school comic book movie
Posted on October 12, 2018
By MARK VIOLA
I’ve never read the Spider-Man comics, but I’ve seen enough of the cartoons and movies to have a decent grasp of the character and his various villains and allies. So, I knew enough of Venom to know that his portrayal in “Spider-Man 3” was an affront to most fans.
With Sony signing off the rights of Spider-Man himself to Marvel and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the studio is trying to figure out how to make movies (and more importantly, money) with all of the characters they still control, including Venom.
Their first attempt to create their own cinematic universe is “Venom,” with Tom Hardy (“The Dark Knight Rises”) as Eddie Brock, a reporter who asks a few too many questions and finds himself infected with an alien symbiote (like a parasite).
Since Venom’s character in the comics is inextricably linked to Spider-Man, the writers had to come up with a different story, one involving an Elon Musk-type billionaire named Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed, “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”). When Eddie goes too far in an interview, he ruins both his own career and that of his fiancee, Anne (Michelle Williams, “The Greatest Showman”). Then comes his encounter with Venom, an alien symbiote brought to Earth by Drake to create a better human that can survive in space.
Eddie discovers that if he wants to survive Drake’s goons, as well as Venom’s fellow symbiotes, he will need to work together with the entity inside his body and his mind.
“Venom” really feels like a comic book movie made 15 years ago, before Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy or the MCU, when adaptations tried to bring the zaniness of the comics to the big screen rather than ground them in reality. There’s not a problem with that approach, but “Venom” is also trying to be a hard PG-13 horror film in superhero tights, and this results in some really wonky tonal shifts, especially with Venom’s character, who is very sarcastic and makes jokes with Eddie.
“Venom” does provide some fun, and it’s not nearly as bad as a lot of critics are saying.
The movie is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for language
Recent Comments