Venom

The best:  The banter between Eddie and Venom

The worst:  Script.  Continuity.  

Comments:  Venom is an interesting movie.

This is a comic book movie through and through.  This is not a bad thing for me as those tend to be some of my favorite movies.  Eddie Brock is a report who crosses the wrong person and loses his job.  Venom is an alien to wants to kill - and potentially eat - everybody, but needs a host to merge with in order to survive our planet.  Mix well and you have our movie.

This movie is a mess.  The bad guy is terrible and so one dimensional it's painful.  The way Eddie gets fired is telegraphed so hard you'd catch it in your sleep.  Venom switching sides comes so completely out of the blue it will leave your head spinning.  The fight at the end is visually appealing but don't think too much about it.  There are more cheesy parts than I can count.  The side characters are so one dimensional they may have just done better using cardboard cutouts.  The story has no depth and I felt as if 8 people had written 8 different scripts for this movie and then merged them together to end up with a startling lack of direction to the story.

And it was pretty fun.  This movie has very little quality (and most of that quality is the superb acting of Tom Hardy) but was a fun time.  Admittedly, it was fun in a "so bad it's good" sort of way, but fun is fun.  Nobody will ever mistake this movie for an Oscar contender, but at least it isn't trying to be one.  They keep it lighthearted through "internal" conversations between Eddie and Venom, most of which are pretty entertaining.  They kept a movie about an alien that wants to eat people's heads at PG-13, which made for some odd scenes.  The action felt more like a video game than a movie.  They keep the story movie along - an absolute requirement for a movie like this to work - and don't hesitate to leave logic behind when it gets inconvenient.  

In the end I have filed this movie away with 'Road House' and 'Con Air' - movies that are a guilty pleasure in that I enjoy watching them even while being painfully aware of how bad they really are.

Rating: 6/10  Just bad enough to be good.