Wednesday 10 October 2018

Venom (15)

And so the Marvel universe continues to expand, this tile with a little help from Sony as super-villan and part-time Thunderbolt Venom hits the big screen.

In giant 3D Imaxery to boot, if that's your thing.

Although to be honest I don't think it would improve anything.



To say I was looking forward to this film would be misleading, but I wasn't NOT looking forward to it. I love the character in Thunderbolts and it might be OK.

I mean, it can't be Hulk bad, can it?

Thankfully, no.

But you could not watch it and have about the same experience we did.

The story, such as it is, centres on Eddie Brock, a maverick journalist never afraid to ask the tough questions even when explicitly asked not to by the man who employs him.

He is chasing science guru and man who wants to emigrate to space, Carlton Drake — a man who can end Eddie's job in a heartbeat.

He's also planning to wed lawyer and cat-loving girlfriend Anne Weying, just as long as he doesn't do anything stupid like steal classified information while she sleeps and throw it in Carlton's face.

Oh whoops....

From here we have Things that happen for Reasons, one thing leads to another, and before we can say hungry Eddie is Venom and the fun really begins.

And the CGI team really earn their burgers.

In essence, the plot matters not a jot — which is probably just as well — as the whole point of the early part of the movie is to get to the Venom bit and then have a lot of running about and fighty-fights.

And in these bits, the film delivers.

You get a lot of bang for your overly-inflated buck, and I would imagine one scene in particular comes into its own in 3D. even more so on an Imax screen.

But therein lies the real problem with this film.

You see, when you watch Avengers, or Guardians, or even a Spidey flick, the plot is the basis on which everything is built.

Yes, there's a lot of CGI wossinames flying about, but the characters have a clear narrative within which they are working.

But in Venom...

For a start, Eddie's about as believable a journalist as Amy Adams is in the Superman films.

And as for his relationship with Anne, there are more convincing couples in the late night films Channel 5 used to specialise in.

And this is all a problem in the writing.

The lead cast of Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams and Riz Ahmed are about as good as any working today, and yet their characters are so badly drawn you really struggle to engage with them.

Which actually makes Venom the best character in the film.

That said, this film is not without its moments.

The audience in our screening laughed out loud a whole once, and the moment with the dog is great — but those are slim pickings for a big-budget super hero film in a world already owned by Marvel.

And when the final end-credit sequence is literally a trailer for a cartoon that's coming out at Christmas, you realise the producers of Venom have really missed the point of, well, everything.



There are worse super hero films out there, largely because no one seems willing to stop Zack Snyder from damaging DC's legacy, but when that's one of the better things about this film...

My hope is that we are heading towards Thunderbolts The Movie.

My other hope is that the other films, should they surface, are better than this.

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