Went to see Venom, Sony’s latest attempt to use their Spider-Man Marvel license without the help of Marvel. Venom is a spider-Man villain/anti-hero who looks like he does because he’s a space-goo symbiote who used to be Spider-man’s black suite (as explained in Spider-Man 3)… but this movie is not based on a Spider-Man universe, not based on Spider-Man 3, and is just its own random story about a character who has vague similarities to the look of Spider-man. Because… I dunno… they still have the rights to Spider-man… but Spidery is currently being shared with Disney/Marvel so no sharing all the toys, I guess.
Regardless of the behind-the-scenes rights razmatazz, this is a stand-alone flick that must stand by itself. It tells a reasonably coherent, self-contained story that borrows (from what I know) a bit from the original comic stories. I’m sure a real Spiderman/Venom fan could point out how terrible this movie is from a continuity standpoint, but I can’t and don’t care.
What I do care about is that this is a confounding film that randomly switches tones half-way through and was clearly meant to be rated R. Normally I’d call this a case of more studio meddling and a total mess… but the weird thing is, it’s not a mess. Even though the film starts as a kind of serious, hard-edged investigative reporting / body-horror film and then left-turns into a kind of dark comedy superhero flick, at least both sides of the movie are coherent and focused. It’s jarring, to say the least, that the film goes from this gritty, dark story to making jokes about how uncool you are when you raise your hands to surrender. But a funny thing happened… I went to thinking that the comedic tone shift just didn’t work to thinking, well, ok if this is the movie now, at least it’s working in this new tone.
But, wow, this movie clearly was meant to be a violent, R rated anti-hero film. As-is, it’s been cut down to a strongly violent PG-13… Venom likes to eat people’s heads off. But the film cuts around it every time and then cracks a joke. It’s as if the studio hadn’t seen either Deadpool movies or Logan. R rated superhero flicks can work and can make money. But maybe the original cut of this thing was too big a turd in the wind.
Anyhow, I’m not saying either version of this movie is great or even good. The film is ok in both its original feel and its second half transition to comedy. The action is alright mostly but then devolves into goo monster fights that are just a bunch of iffy CGI effects or blobs fighting each other. The climactic action scenes feels both random in that way and also really small scale. The film has ultimately nothing to say, no message, no theme, and just a big blob fight in place of anything interesting.
So, hey, its not by far the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Some of the early character driven and body horror stuff is actually pretty good and gave me real hope. When it transitions to a more jokey action flick, it was disappointing in general but at least what it became was a good enough version of that. The end was a plopped mess but, even then, I’ve seen worse. This is just a decent anti-hero/superhero flick that would have been better if it had been more consistent. But it ain’t and this is it. Probably not worth seeing at the theaters unless you are a big fan (and then you might not like it for its misuse of the character and story).
Score: 78