Green Goblin Reviews: Venom
Hello, folks!! Who’s ready to hear an unpopular opinion? Because here’s one of mine that I’ve always had to explain to folks: I have never been very fond of the character Venom. Now, most people know I’m a Spider-man fan down to my very soul, so they find that a little hard to comprehend. “How can you not like Venom? He’s like Spidey’s worst enemy!!” they say to me. First, he’s not. If we’re ranking Spidey villains, he’s taking home the bronze at best, behind Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus. More importantly, Venom just isn’t that interesting of a character to me. He starts off motivated purely by revenge, begrudgingly becomes a good guy, moves across the country to get over his ex (Parker), starts to rip off Spawn’s whole gimmick with his “Lethal Protector” schtick and gives birth to a bunch of forgettable technicolor Venom-babies before auctioning off the symbiote, contracting cancer and attempting suicide. But throughout the entire Venom legacy, there is one thing that I believe fans cling to more than anything. And that is that Venom’s visual appearance…….is undeniably cool. Credit where credit is due to Todd MacFarlene for a legitimately cool design, but when you take a few steps back and actually look into their motivations, their personalities or their actual comic book arcs you can see that he’s really just a testament to the edgelord 90’s comic industry that spawned him. Just like…..well, Spawn. I’m leading into my review with this, because not only is it how I’ve felt about Venom my entire life, but it’s a perfect encapsulation of this movie: Cool looking, but pretty dumb and uneventful.
I’ve heard this film compared to 2004’s Catwoman in terms of quality and I’ll come clean and tell you that it’s honestly not that bad. But it does follow in that film’s footsteps in a few regards. For one, it’s an anti-hero story about a character deeply connected to a superhero, who’s never once reference in the film, so if you were holding out for a Tom Holland cameo, I’ll just spoil that and let you know that it’s not gonna happen. Feige and the MCU wants no part to what Sony’s cooking up here. They do however kill off a couple Spider-man background characters somewhat unceremoniously (one right at the beginning, reminiscent of Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice), so if you want a couple threads of non-existent continuity, there ya have it.
The film starts with a private space shuttle owned by the Life Foundation crashing in Malaysia, with the CEO (Riz Ahmed) watching from onsite GoPros as they remove three “samples” from the wreckage, while the only survivor of the crash is rushed onto an ambulance. While in transit, the survivor abruptly sits upright and murders the two EMTs, possessing one of them and escapes. At this point, the title appears on screen and never in my life have I wished for a movie to have been R rated. The feeling was almost instantaneous, when I saw how incredibly tame those two murders were, yet the camera wanted you to believe you were looking at a scene from a horror movie. If you’re gonna kill off so many people, you can at least make the deaths look interesting.
We then cut to Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy), asleep in bed. Already “run out of New York” for reasons that are never explained, he’s followed his attorney fiance Anne (Michelle William) to LA to continue his journalism career. Over the next 30 minutes or so, we witness Brock make laughably stupid mistakes one after another and lose his job, his fiance, his social standing and his motivation all over the course of about a day. Like, I know a little about law and very little about journalism and his mistakes were just objectively foolish. Even more, everyone around him are following suit with really poor choices as well. Life’s CEO decides to take the symbiote samples and immediately dive into human testing without any research backing it up and Anne’s lawfirm literally represents the Life Foundation, yet she doesn’t immediately have Eddie drop his interview with the CEO as a conflict of interest, nor does Eddie’s boss, nor does Eddie. Brock’s shown as this super awesome “champion of the people” reporter and it’s clear that he doesn’t know what the flying fuck he’s doing. Six months after Eddie fucks up his life in so many words, he’s approached by a Life scientist (Jenny Slate), who tells Eddie that they’re taking homeless people off the streets, experimenting on them and murdering them. Rather than taking this information (and any other info that she clearly has on her) directly to the police or some news sources, Eddie decides to break into the Life Foundation directly with the scientist. He pauses when he sees a homeless woman he recognizes in a cell. When he frees her, she attacks him and transfers one of the symbiotes onto him. He escapes, displaying clear superhuman feats that he never questions, before eventually being confronted not only by the mind of the symbiote Venom, but also by the Life Foundation’s PMCs. From that point on, the film is just the PMCs chasing them down, Bock and Venom bickering with each other and cutting back to the one escaped symbiote from the crash, slowly possessing its way back to its brethren at the Life Foundation labs, ala that dude who found the Spear of Destiny in the Constantine movie.
I will say that there are a few things that I thought weren’t half bad. Hardy himself plays an interesting take on Eddie Brock. He’s sorta mumbly and quick-witted and when he bickers with the symbiote, it can be captivating at times. But more often than not, it sounds like either Jim Carrey from LiarLiar or Sam Witwicky from the Bay Transformers films with a mild New York accent underneath. The design of the symbiote itself is actually pretty damn good, both in its ethereal “blob” form and with its demonic teeth and eyes. Apart from those two things (one and a half?), I’m genuinely having a hard time coming up with anything else positive to say about this movie. I honestly couldn’t give a damn about Eddie and Anne’s broken relationship, the side characters are all surprisingly unlikeable (they’re all either idiots or assholes) and the villain is D-rank at best, landing somewhere slightly higher up than Steppenwolf, but still several steps below Ronan the Accuser. Hell, even in the comics, the villain’s final form is a character that nobody remembers or cares about. And when neither your hero nor your villain can keep your audience’s attention, then I wouldn’t start banking on a sequel (no matter who you slap in a dumb red wig for the post-credit sting).
I will say that my contempt with the character of Venom isn’t by any means, universal. I like the Agent Venom story arc in the comics, as amputee war veteran Flash Thompson is just a much more compelling character. I also thought the Spectacular Spider-man cartoon did a fantastic job of blending the 616 and Ultimate Eddie Brock into one character, giving him a surprisingly sympathetic motivation and made (for my money) the best version of Venom available. And I know I’m gonna get flack for this, but I was fine with Topher Grace’s take on the character as well in Spider-man 3. A hero driven by his moral compass meets a dark scumbag reflection that’s driven by narcissism only to turn to wrath and cruelty when given power? Yeah, that works. Hell, after seeing this film, I think you should all collectively apologize to Topher. He turned in a much better performance than this film and you’ve all been very mean to him over the years.
I know that there’s very little I can say to stop 90’s kids from seeing this film. They like Venom and I’m one of the outliers. I get it. But once you get over seeing how cool he looks on the screen, take a few minutes in the credits during that Eminen song and actually reflect on the story you just watched and ask yourself if it was honestly worth it.
4/10 It’s not insultingly bad, but it’s still pretty bad. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna play some PS4 Spider-man to wash the taste of that windy turd outta my mouth.