I knew Venom from the old Spider-Man comics long before Sony gave him his own movie, back when he was just a black suit that made Peter meaner before anyone bothered explaining where it came from. So this Venom review comes with a built-in comparison point, and it’s not a flattering one for Sony’s first attempt at the character. Topher Grace got maybe fifteen minutes of screen time in Spider-Man 3 and had to play a Wall Street guy who suddenly turns evil for reasons nobody in that script cared to sell. There was never a version of that performance that was going to land. Put Tom Hardy in the suit with a script that actually knows what to do with him, and the gap between the two isn’t close. It’s not even the same category of movie.
What Sony got right this time is treating the bonding as the whole point instead of a plot mechanic to get through on the way to the real story. Eddie Brock is a wrecked investigative journalist by the time the symbiote finds him. Fired, dumped, living in a motel with nothing left to lose. The film hands most of its runtime to a creature living in his head that talks back, insults him, and eats live lobsters out of a restaurant tank. That’s the movie, and I mean that as a compliment. Not the Life Foundation conspiracy. Not Riot. Not the finale. Eddie arguing with a parasite that thinks he’s a loser and slowly deciding it likes him anyway.
Hardy’s doing something nobody else in this genre attempts
Watching Hardy play both halves of that relationship is the reason to see this at all. He’s doing full physical comedy as a man having a public breakdown in one register, then doing a second, meaner performance as the voice telling him he’s pathetic in another, and somehow keeping both readable as the same person. Eddie’s decline plays out almost entirely on Hardy’s face and posture before Venom ever gets a line, which is a harder job than the marketing for this thing ever gave him credit for.
I’d love to have seen Spider-Man in this movie. He’s always been my favorite, and a Spider-Man villain film with the actual hero physically absent from the whole picture is a genuinely strange thing to release. Sony owns his supporting cast and not him, and instead of hiding that gap they built a movie around it. It shouldn’t work as well as it does, and yet here we are.
Michelle Williams gets criminally little to do as Anne Weying for most of the runtime, stuck playing the ex-fiancée who watches Eddie fall apart from the outside. Then the film gives her thirty seconds with the symbiote herself, late on, and it’s the single funniest thing in the movie. It’s a small moment and it shouldn’t work either, but it’s proof the bonding idea is strong enough to carry a scene even when it isn’t the main event.
Riot and Carlton Drake are the part of the film everyone correctly complains about. Two CGI blobs crashing into each other through a chaotic third act, the same problem the first Iron Man had a decade earlier and somehow still hasn’t solved. I don’t disagree with any of that criticism. I just don’t think it matters much next to what Hardy’s doing in every scene that isn’t the finale, because the finale is easily the least interesting thing happening on screen.
The R-rated argument, and why it isn’t going away
Every review of this thing points at the PG-13 rating like it’s the whole problem, and I think they’re onto something real. Deadpool proved an R-rated comic book movie could make serious money, and Venom is a character built for exactly that kind of nastiness. The lobster tank scene. The head-eating at the end. A monster that talks like it wants to kill you and, on more than one occasion, actually does. An R rating wouldn’t have fixed Riot or the CGI-collision problem. What it would have done is let the Eddie-and-Venom material go all the way instead of stopping just short, and that’s the part of this movie I actually wanted more of.
That said, the film gets a lot of mileage out of playing that relationship as comedy rather than horror, and the way it handles Eddie’s spiral into what looks from the outside like full-blown insanity is genuinely well done. Nobody around him reads what’s happening as anything but a man falling apart: not his ex, not the doctors, not the guy at the motel who has to deal with him at his worst. The movie lets that read sit uncomfortably next to what the audience already knows is happening inside his head. That’s a harder trick to land than the CGI-monster stuff usually gets credit for.
An origin movie that still has its own story to tell
Every complaint about this being an intro movie for a bigger franchise is fair, and I still think it earns its own two hours on its own terms. It isn’t just table-setting for a sequel that hadn’t been greenlit yet. Eddie’s decline, the bonding, the odd-couple stretch through the middle, the choice Venom makes at the end to stay loyal to a guy it started out despising: that’s a complete arc, whatever else gets stacked around it for future installments. A lot of comic book movies from this stretch of the decade can’t say the same about themselves. This one earns the ending it gets rather than just pointing at whatever comes next.
I’m giving this one a four out of five. It’s a genuinely strong watch, and for a film whose entire job is introducing a character and setting up whatever the studio has planned next, it had more of its own story than it strictly needed. Sony had this character on screen once already and wasted him in fifteen minutes of somebody else’s movie. This time he got the actor and the script he always deserved, and there’s no equating the two results.
The stinger at the end has Eddie interviewing a prisoner named Cletus Kasady, played by Woody Harrelson in a truly unsubtle red wig, and it’s the one moment where I’m actively curious what Sony’s building toward next. As of right now I have no idea where any of that goes. Worth remembering too: this whole universe is running six months after Infinity War wiped out half of existence and about a year after Homecoming put Peter Parker back on screen in the first place, and Venom never once acknowledges either franchise. That’s either a strange gap in an otherwise connected pop-culture moment or the most honest thing about the whole project. This universe exists because Sony still owns the characters orbiting Spider-Man, and none of them get to say his name out loud.