Venom Review: 5 Ups & 5 Downs

2. The Supporting Cast (Especially Poor Michelle Williams)

If you were to remove all of the supporting cast and just have Tom Hardy walkign around having arguments with himself for two hours, Venom would be a better film. The script even seems to know that, because everything centred on him is great and charitable and very funny and then everything else is... not.

Chief offender among all the elements (other than the writing, which is coming up soon) is the supporting cast. Riz Ahmed plays an amalgamation of Richard Branson and Elon Musk with all the cliched markers of a corporate bad science dude, Jenny Slate's Dr Dora Skirth is basically a non-entity other than helping Brock get into the mysterious Life corporation and nobody else really qualifies as a notable character. Well, nobody other than poor Michelle Williams who has been absolutely neglected by this movie.

She has pretty much one notable moment and for the rest of the time is lumbered with that issue that way too many female characters in the MCU struggled with for so long. She has precious little to do and the little there actually is just isn't all that interesting or well written.