Let's get this out of the way early and start by saying that Venom is nowhere near as bad as some people are making out. If you went in for immature humour, cartoony violence/references and a badass looking character then it delivers. There's a LOT of problems but it's a fun ride, just with no real substance. It seems short and flies by. You can see the potential throughout which gets frustrating when it's squandered but there's plenty to like.
There's no getting around the fact though that this movie should never have been attempted without any reference anywhere to Spider-Man and it ends up feeling very slight with no sense of threat, conflict or menace. In that respect the post credits scene should have been the movie that was made instead of a tease of a movie that will most likely never happen.
Tonally the film and it's star don't know what they're doing, veering between drama, buddy comedy, dark humour, superheroics and action, whilst that's never boring and some of the acting and interactions are really good there's absolutely no exploration of the horror aspects of the character with an opportunity wasted to deal with things like body horror, possession and identity (i.e the monster within). None of that is remotely touched on in this movie, heads are bitten off bloodlessly and mainly off screen and this is inexplicably played for laughs, with the characters on screen acting accordingly. There's a particularly bad scene where a character addresses having done something horrifying for a second then basically shrugs and goes back to making goofy jokes.
There's a handful of neat cameos and moments for hard-core fans of the comics but there's no real impressive-seeming threat as I mentioned and the finale comes down to watching two balls of near-identical sticky tar trying to hump each other. The movie absolutely should have embraced a higher age rating and leaned into the violence and truly dark humour. A good solo film of Venom really should be darker too (meaning in tone and subject, not like this movie where everything is 100% at night and it's often hard to make out what's going on).
There'll be people who really enjoy themselves and I agree that on a schlock B-movie level its a success, it's weirdly greater than the sum of it's parts and often works despite it's flaws. Decide for yourself if you're interested in seeing it, but go in with no expectations.
*** (3/5)
MM
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