VENOM: To The Garbage, With Love

Now that we’re nearly twenty years into the modern superhero era, we’ve become comfortable taking the themes behind these costumed paragons seriously. The original X-Men trilogy was a barely veiled metaphor for the gay rights movement, the MCU built up their heroes only to challenge their assumed superiority, and even more lighthearted fare like Deadpool worked hard at their send-ups.

It’s hard to deny that lots of these films are made with care, so when the much-delayed Spider-Man spinoff Venom finally went into production with acclaimed actors like Tom Hardy and Michelle Williams, it was reasonable of us to expect a thoughtful take on the character. The gritty first trailer only heightened these assumptions, and while the presence of director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) indicated it was probably going to have some levity, nothing prepared us for what Venom actually is.

You see, Venom is a frivolous, live-in-the-moment exercise in silliness. Whether this was intentional or not is impossible to determine from the outside, and frankly, I don’t think it really matters. So much of it is amusingly off-kilter that the joy of watching it is equivalent to the pleasure of eating junk food. It’s utter garbage; you won’t think about it once it’s gone, but it’ll hit a lot of instant pleasure centers.

The Genuinely Good

One of the big obstacles for Venom was the fact that they couldn’t use Spider-Man, the titular character’s arch nemesis and reason for existence. The teen web slinger had become wrapped up in the MCU, and thanks to the labyrinthine contracts surrounding character rights, Sony couldn’t use him for their new franchise. So the project had a big hole to fill, and that’s largely accomplished by doubling up on Tom Hardy.

Hardy plays both Eddie Brock, investigative journalist and perfect symbiote host, and the alien symbiote itself, Venom. And sure, Venom is largely a CGI monstrosity, but the film also has him appear as a voice in Brock’s head. That means you get scenes of Hardy walking around holding conversations with the disembodied voice of Venom, and yes, it’s as bizarre as you’re imagining.

The thing is that Hardy makes it work by leaning into how silly the situation is. He’s playing a guy with an alien inside of him for god’s sake, and not a very mature alien, either. Thankfully, he knows to be playful about it, and that energy permeates out into the audience. His thrashing when Brock and Venom fight for control is bombastic, but more importantly, he delivers puerile lines without a hint of sheepishness. This straightforward line reading allows the weirdness to land, and at its core, the weirdness of Hardy enthusiastically talking about chewing innards while his face recoils in horror is the reason for this film’s existence.

The Kitsch That Works

Unfortunately, no one else in the film seems to be on the same wavelength as Hardy. Serious approaches creep in from all directions, and oddly, the amount of people doing serious terribly adds to the film’s charmingly eccentric nature.

Poor Michelle Williams seems as lost as a deer in headlights, fumbling through her romantic scenes with Hardy in a way that makes their relationship the most alien thing in the movie. Then there’s Riz Ahmed, who was apparently cast to prove that playing a mad scientist is far outside of his capabilities.

But none of the actors can have the kind of widespread, make-or-break influence as the interplay between this film’s plot and editing. Nothing about this film’s writing makes sense, from its constantly broken rules for how the symbiotes survive to its whiplash-inducing character developments. In most cases this would be frustrating, but here the editing constantly tells you that none of it matters.

There’s a jerkiness to the way Venom moves between and within scenes, almost as if it’s trying to jump away from its shortcomings. This gives the film a sprinter’s pace, and before you know it too many plot points have whizzed by for you to keep up. There’s hardly a more clear way for a film to indicate you shouldn’t care about the coherence of its story, and if that sounds like a cop out, well, it kind of is. However, if you were willing to let Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again say ‘screw plot, here’s Lily James and Dancing Queen’, then you have to extend the same frivolity to Venom. Plus, it never cheats and tries to make anything important; the film is herky-jerky to the bitter end, and that consistent madness is part of its appeal.

The Actual Failures

As you may have gathered, Venom isn’t good when it tries to be like other superhero films of today, but there’s a sense that it was expected to tick some of those genre standards. There’s a vague link between the story and hot-button issues like climate change, and of course there’s the obligatory final battle. None of this works, and the few people who successfully latched onto these things only hurt the film in the long run.

Take, for instance, Jenny Slate. She’s cast against type here as one of the scientists working for Ahmed, and is saddled with both technical exposition and a character with a moral compass. She actually handles both of these things well, but that happens to be exactly the opposite of what this film needs. Poor pronunciation of scientific jargon and her usual standoffish air would’ve worked better against the underplayed insanity of Ahmed’s evil plan. As is, she mostly just lets the air out of the film, and the best thing about her performance is that it’s relatively brief.

The final battle and a few of the lead-up fights are far more detrimental to the film as a whole. They’re underwhelming messes of bad CGI and incomprehensible staging, essentially just wasted space in an otherwise jaunty film. You rarely get a clear look at Venom when he’s fighting, partially because of his pitch black character design and partially because the movie has been edited to within an inch of its PG-13 life. Any real violence had to be taken out so teens could get in, and the way this character fights simply isn’t conducive to bloodless battles. Quite simply, these scenes drag, and that’s a killer for a movie intent on running from its problems.

Venom: Success In Spite Of Itself

Venom is a film with a myriad of problems, but they’re forgiven because of its affable undercutting of what you expect from superhero films. Turns out that it’s a throwback to a time when these stories had a charming clumsiness and no one was quite sure what to do with them.

In this light, maybe the marketing for Venom wasn’t as misleading as it seemed. After all, people were so quick to put googly eyes on early images of Venom that they were clearly picking up on something silly, and your reaction to that teeth-baring, cross-eyed monstrosity is probably close to how you’ll react to the actual film.

Were you charmed by this mess? Let us know in the comments!

Venom is out now in the US and the UK.