Venom Review: 5 Ups & 5 Downs

1. It's Fatally Boring A Lot Of The Time

The first half of Venom is an absolute snooze-fest that seems to almost provocatively mishandle Tom Hardy's charismatic lead to the point that it's almost akin to abuse of him.

You can see what they're trying to do (and indeed the set up of it being a conventional movie in order to make Venom's appearance then even more impactful works to a certain degree), but if you took Hardy out of it, it would be absolutely irredeemable. None of the characters are particularly well-drawn or interesting, the science-fiction elements are derivative and uninspiring and the attempts to make it a horror die on arrival.

Curiously, it also feels completely outdated, as if it was made before the MCU watershed and before comic book movies became something else. That feeling persists even after Venom appears, but he masks it well (albeit with the caveat that the film definitely belongs around 2001 without him).

The most frustrating thing about the entire thing is that if you read much about the first half, you won't go and see it. And not only that, but it feels like a lot of the reviews are so spiteful simply because the reviewers couldn't stomach how poor that first half was and ended up misreading the rest of the movie as unintentionally funny when it's genuinely intentionally hilarious.

And now for the positives...