No, I'm not doing a full blown review on Venom, not when there's folks like The Angry Joe Show and other outlets that pretty much put into words what's the general consensus about that film is. What I will do though? I'll offer some brief thoughts coming out of it Thursday evening.
Like I said on my personal Facebook account, Sony Pictures needs to just scrap this whole idea of a Spider-Man-centric cinematic universe and just leave all live-action handlings of that character and his corresponding associates and secondary characters to Kevin Feige and the rest of the folks at Marvel Studios. I shudder at the thought that Sony Pictures still have films on Kraven the Hunter, Black Cat, and Silver Sable up in the pipeline. Silver and Black, the rumored Black Cat and Silver Sable team-up film, was reported to be cancelled earlier this year in favor of solo outings for those two characters.
Everyone seems to point to Upgrade as a better symbiotic relationship expressed in a film in comparison to Venom for the views who left this film with a sour taste in their mouths. I finally had a chance to check out that film Wednesday evening (10/9/18) online and I'm inclined to agree with the critics on that comparison. Whereas Upgrade was in the vein of "body horror/cyberpunk fantasy" in terms of the mesh-mash of genres, Venom comes across as superhero comedy. And don't get me wrong either, that film has just as many plot holes as Venom does, so it's far from perfect even though it has a lot of ambitious ideas. Not to mention Upgrade is predictable as all hell in terms of its narrative. I just applaud how STEM and Grey's relationship is portrayed in that film in terms of the whole "control" issue that seems to pop up in Venom. Eddie has more control over Venom in the end, but (SPOILER ALERT!!!) STEM ends up controlling his host completely by the end of Upgrade. That's the sort of "wicked" twist I expected coming out of something that is billed as a horror film and didn't want to see in Venom, especially if they were gunning to stay at least somewhat faithful to the source material.
In all honesty, I went into Venom expecting nothing (exactly what I mentioned when I saw the first few trailers for this) and go exactly what I expected from it; that's why I'm not as outraged and angry as most people leaving the theater.
This version of Eddie Brock was referred to as a "loser" by the symbiote and those around him after his life as a reporter (known for his expertise at digging up the dirt on his targets) was brought down into the gutter. I honestly didn't see anything too bad with his life up before that - he had a fiancée in Anne Weying (God, I couldn't believe they had her in this - honestly haven't even heard that name since Venom's mini-series from the 90's) and a stable, yet decent job as a reporter that wasn't at the Daily Bugle. He wasn't depicted as the sleezeball, scrumbag that he was seen as in the early days of the Spider-Man comics and even more so in the finale of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy. He gains the symbiote in a manner without any relation to nor reference to Spider-Man, so that explains why the titular character doesn't sport any Spider-Man's iconic powers nor has the giant spider symbol on his chest. The sad thing about it though, if you have seen all of the trailers for this film, then you've seen roughly 80% of every action sequence in the film from top to bottom. The motorcycle chase was in the trailers, same for the majority of the fight against the police and armored soldiers (this actually looked really good, despite the fact that Venom looks fake as hell moving around in CGI), and maybe a few seconds of the finale against Riot was in one of the trailers that I remember seeing too. Those scenes weren't bad per say, but they weren't really anything I would've gone out of my way to see either nor recommend to a friend to check out.
In terms of tone, this film was all over the place. One minute it's hella serious. A few seconds later, they are dropping punchline after punchline with Eddie and Venom's relationship and I'm sitting in the theater wondering should I even take this serious or just chuck this film into the same vein as Deadpool's level of humor (or at least a poor attempt at it). Most of the humor fell flat, but I found myself laughing at a lot of things in the film, even if the delivery and punchlines weren't on the mark. It just amused me that there are quite the few "clever" references to Venom's 90's comics and lore (Seriously, who saw that She-Venom/Bride of Venom cameo coming?) while at the same time, this film seems to have little to no idea on the pure essence of this character. Venom and Eddie Brock were more than just an alien costume on auto-pilot while Eddie watches and begs his symbiote partner not to eat the brains of his victims. No, they are a team a perfect symbiosis - no pun intended there. From the moment Eddie got the symbiote to the end of the film, I never got the sense of that. It was like Eddie was a human meat puppet while Venom got to cruise around in his skin when he liked.
I'm not even going to dwell on the sheer amount of plotholes that weren't addressed in the film, ranging from what damage was the symbiote doing to Eddie Brock's body that the doctors explained that their bond was "killing its host" by consuming his organs to the whole ordeal of Venom "changed his mind" about wanting to conquering the planet and Eddie helped him do that. Tom Hardy expressed in pre-release interviews that his favorite parts of this movie were roughly 40 minutes that were completely cut out of the theatrical release. I'm guessing those scenes would have filled in the gaps and MIGHT have left a better impression on those who checked out of morbid curiosity (like myself), but I guess everyone would be left to wonder about that until an inevitable "director's cut" is released on DVD/Blu-Ray in a few months.
Should you go out of your way to see this? Nope. For many, this will be the Catwoman on the end of the Marvel Comics side of things like how that film was for DC Comics. Trust me, this will be on Netflix/Redbox soon enough. I only went on Thursday night for the premiere out of morbid curiosity to see if it was as bad as the early reviews pegged it for.
I will give Sony Pictures credit as they are geniuses in the marketing for Spider-Man: Enter the Spider-Verse. They showed a five minute clip of that film during what many superhero filmgoers (especially Marvel Studios' fans) sit through the ending credits in hopes of a teaser for something better in the pipeline of what is yet to come. I was so impressed by that sequence - the animation style, the narrative, and the action - that I completely wiped my mind with that trash that I saw from Venom and left the theater with a smile on my face. I know I'm definitely going to see that come December.
By the way, that's NOT the Black Panther chasing Miles Morales around like how most people in the theater were convinced that was in the teaser trailer. That is The Prowler, someone in Miles' continuity that is VERY important to his origins and how he got bitten by the radioactive spider that gave him his powers in the first place.
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