Venom

VENOM

Director': Ruben Fleischer
Year : 2018
Genre : Superhero
Rating : *1/2

Having trashed the legacy of Marvel's star superhero with the atrocious 'Amazing Spider-Man' double bill, Sony Pictures now attempts to breathe new life into their dwindling franchise with 'Venom', a shambolic and frequently annoying exercise in corporate greed that serves less as a vessel for entertainment and more as a method of retaining the rights to the titular anti-hero. 

With Spider-Man himself in absentia (due to Marvel's ownership of the character), the team of producers and screenwriters have had to conjure up a new origin story for the webhead's most iconic villain. Tom Hardy is a great actor but he embarrasses himself here as journalist Eddie Brock who, while trying to bring down a corrupt biological scientist (played by a sorely underused Riz Ahmed), becomes infected with a carnivorous alien-life form. Now gifted with inconsistent superpowers, Eddie quickly develops a strange Jekyll and Hyde-esque symbiotic relationship with his razor-fanged companion and it's not long before the two of them are prowling the streets at night biting the heads off nameless bad guys.

Having previously helmed the gory 2009 hit 'Zombieland', director Ruben Fleischer is no stranger to the world of horror comedy and there are several moments throughout 'Venom' which seem to hint at a far more brutal and edgy picture than the one we eventually got. However, there is an air of studio interference that permeates every second of the now PG-13 rated movie which ultimately dilutes any sense of fun or adventure. Rather than being a movie made with love and passion, 'Venom' is instead a toothless exercise in banality concocted solely through  countless spreadsheets and committees - an aspect so clearly visible in the films sequel-baiting post credits sequence.

When compared to the very worst superhero movies such as 'Batman Forever', 'Fant4stic', and 'Catwoman', 'Venom' isn't a total calamity and indeed, some audience members may enjoy the strange interplay between Brock and his extra-terrestrial sidekick as well as the completely out-of-place slapstick and awkward one-liners scattered haphazardly throughout the films overlong running time. However, despite a few select action scenes and an admittedly spirited performance from Tom Hardy, 'Venom' is an outdated, tonally skewed, poorly written and visually unappealing mess that fails to follow or even acknowledge the progress made by the last decade of blockbuster filmmaking and if it's poor box office performance and damning critical reception is anything to go by, Sony have devoured any chances of getting a future sequel.