Venom Review

     Oh dear, where to start....

    This film is so bad, so very bad! I didn't have particularly high expectations - hell, I didn't even have medium expectations! - but it still managed to be worse than what I was prepared for.

    The writing is atrocious, the story bland, the action scenes forgettable, and the acting painful. Given that we have some heavy-hitters in the cast, I have to highlight the director: it isn't easy to make Tom Hardy AND Michelle Williams AND Riz Ahmed all act like cardboard cutouts but somehow Ruben Fleischer managed to do so, bravo! True, the dialogue must have been difficult to deliver with a straight face but I'm sure there were decent takes to choose from; all left on the editing floor, clearly. Every component of the film is a cliché stacked on another cliché without a single original moment just to vary things up. I mean, it's almost impressive, to be this un-unique.

    Not everything is doom and gloom, though. Venom's voice was the only good acting on display (I see nowhere contradicting this so I must assume it was Hardy) and there is a certain banter between "parasite" and host that could almost pass as humour. The only truly awesome part of the film, however, comes in Eminem's title song which, characteristically, kicks ass!

    Strangely, though, despite all of the above, despite the fact that I am supremely glad to have watched this on Netflix at home where I could organise paperwork at the same time rather than suffer through boredom in a movie theatre, it was still somewhat entertaining. I may not have laughed with the film but I certainly laughed at it. That alone saves it from my lowest rating!


    Conclusion: Nuh-uh [what's this?]


Venom came out in 2018.

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