Skip to main content

Incorrigibly Venomous


Movies like Venom are good reminders of how the comic book genre on film has its limits. Though we’ve gotten plenty of good from it, some characters and properties can’t and probably shouldn’t be translated. It’s also a sure sign of just how out-of-touch the people making movies like this are, given how their blatant attempt to cater to both the sharp wit and endearing levity of Marvel’s ilk as well as the dark and disturbing grittiness the recent DC films have tried to pull off results in a baffling inconsistency of tone that goes along with a heap of other problems that plague Venom.
The story concerns investigative journalist Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy), who loses his job after grilling Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), the CEO of a prominent Bioengineering company called the Life Foundation. Having exposed classified secrets from his girlfriend Annie (Michelle Williams), it results in the dissolution of their relationship too. As it happens, Drake is callously using human test subjects on alien symbiotic lifeforms the company recovered from a probe, and when Brock is lured back to document it, one of them infects him. Unable to control the sinister creature called Venom, Brock attempts to seek help while also evading Drakes’ pursuers and the authorities.
As badly written and bizarre as its trailer promised, Venom is full of ill-fitting dialogue and poor characterization; the actors struggle with awkward lines and confusing actions. It’s terribly paced too, and the story is notably incomplete. There are large chunks of the middle of this movie that seem to be missing, crucial character developments absent in place of sudden new relationships and motivations. It’s as jarring as the movie’s tone problem, where hideous imagery, exorbitant destruction, and elements of body horror exist in the same capacity as buoyant comic relief and banter between Brock and Venom.
But what really keeps you from being invested in anything is the staleness, if not contemptibility of the characters on screen. Eddie Brock is not a very likeable protagonist -he’s arrogant, deceitful, slovenly, dispassionate, and idiotic, but without any charm or heart to make such characteristics bearable. Part of this comes down to the writing, but is also due to Tom Hardy’s lacklustre acting, which is at times overblown, and at other times phoned in. He’s a good actor though, director Ruben Fleischer simply doesn’t seem to know what he wants from him. The result is Hardy just kind of meandering through the movie without much focus, occasionally with a frantic moment or dull reaction to something. Hardy also provides the voice of Venom, though you’d hardly know it, which I suppose makes the chaotic symbiote the better performance he’s giving. This character has more personality, but he’s the most harmed by the movies’ structural deficiencies. Michelle Williams is the unfailingly insipid supporting love interest, which is insulting both because of how tired that character type is and because Michelle Williams is one of the best actresses working today. Actors like Jenny Slate and Melora Walters are wasted as mere plot conveniences, and Riz Ahmed’s villain is pretty thin in his indifference and insanity. And it seems a little strange for there to be a villain in this Venom movie who’s not Venom.
What’s most baffling is how the movie tries to make Venom an antihero despite how monstrous his very nature is. That’s where it’s difficult to make a movie like this work. Venom is an alien parasite, virtually indestructible, who’s only driven to consume or control. He’s a supervillain, and a pretty cleverly crafted one at that, and there’s no way to effectively translate his story into a conventional good vs. evil superhero narrative. It’s hard to root for the success of a character who’s proven he’s morally reprehensible, and has killed dozens of innocent people before a change of heart allows him to combat a greater evil. It would be like making a movie about the Joker (which is in fact happening) and contriving a way for him to save the world. What really doesn’t help endearing Venom is that he and the other symbiotes make the film more violent than most R-rated movies I’ve seen. It’s a textbook example of everything wrong with the PG-13 rating, allowing for an immensely high body count, both in characters directly killed by Venom and in the devastation left behind by the aliens’ actions, but getting away with it because of an absence of blood and gore. And the violence in this movie is all just a reckless and lazy attempt to be taken seriously.
If Venom really leaned into the sinister horror aspect of its premise and relied less on conventional superhero movie markers and (of course) building a cinematic universe, this might have ,been something brilliant. But in going for the latter approach it fails to compromise battling tones. and left so much on the cutting room floor that it seriously damages the movies’ structure. It’s just a dumb, condescendingly excessive comic book flick, like a ravenous soulless symbiote without a human host.

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
1 comment
Read more

Back to the Feature: New York, New York (1977)

New York, New York  is a two hour forty minute musical movie largely about a toxic relationship and I understand why it was Martin Scorsese’s first big flop. Some have blamed its poor reception on the kind of movie it was, of a style and tone Scorsese wasn’t known for, but I find that hard to believe. Even after only five films, he’d proven himself an extremely versatile director, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore  found an audience. Sure this jazz musical love letter to New York City was following up Taxi Driver and its’ far more cynical take on the city, but then it’s also ‘from the director of Taxi Driver ’ which itself was a big hit. Was it a matter of public appetite for musicals, or mere word of mouth and early critical reception that dissuaded viewers? Irrespective of that, I was stunned to discover this movie was the origin of the titular song, which I’d assumed was much older (it’s definitely got the sound of something that might have come out of the Jazz sce...
Post a Comment
Read more