Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Venom Blu-ray Review

Reviewed by Martin Liebman, December 18, 2018

Comic book villains have largely played foils in Superhero films rather than be portrayed as the subjects of a movie. While there are instances where villains have stolen the show or played an expanded role in a picture or even appeared in the title of a film , it's pretty much always been the good guys who take top billing. Things change with, Director Ruben Fleischer's ( Zombieland ) stab at turning the Superhero film over to a (generally speaking) "bad guy." Fleischer and Writers Jeff Pinkner, Scott Rosenberg, and Kelly Marcel ultimately present Venom as a gray-area anti-hero and with a humorous streak for the black-clad symbiote rather than risking what might have been a more rewarding push to darker and perhaps even R-rated territory. The end result is a standardized, seemingly watered down film that plays for the widest possible audience rather than exploring more interesting and off-the-beaten-path avenues for one of Marvel's more compelling characters.Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is a popular and aggressive investigative reporter in the San Francisco Bay Area. His latest assignment tasks him with interviewing Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), a brilliant scientific mind and head of the Life Foundation. Drake is a believer in space travel, in discovering the untapped resources and potential the universe beyond Earth's borders has to offer mankind. His latest mission into space ends in disaster when the ship crashes back to Earth. The ship was carrying several alien symbiotes, three of which are recovered, one of which remains on the loose. When Brock uses the interview as a front to confront Drake about rumors that his empire has been built on dead bodies and underhanded and unethical scientific methods, he is escorted from the premises, fired from his job, and his girlfriend Anne (Michelle Williams) breaks up with him. She, too has been fired from her job for failing to keep confidential material from him.Months later, sulking in his unemployment, Brock is approached by one of Drake's employees who reveals to him the truth behind the operation, that the poor and uneducated are being used in Brock's laboratory research with no regard for their well-being. With no other direction to take his life, he risks what little he has left to infiltrate Drake's operation. Brock learns that Drake's ultimate plan is to cross humans with alien symbiotes to propel man's ability to exist off planet, a planet that is dying from pollution and overpopulation. When one of the aliens inhabits Brock's body, he experiences radical changes: excess body heat, ravenous hunger, increased physical agility, and he hears a voice in his head that becomes ever more prominent in defining who he is. All of it eventually manifests into a hideous alien façade capable of frightening acts of body morphing and lethal attacks. As Brock comes to terms with the symbiote inside, Venom/Brock find themselves on the run from Drake's men and another symbiote more powerful than Venom.is not the first film about aliens inhabiting a human host, and several others have done it better, including The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers . There is of course plenty of opportunity for interesting character analysis as Eddie falls into the clutches of the symbiotic relationship building inside of him. But rather than unearth the dark and sinister realities, the film instead aims to be as hip as possible, to voice Venom with attitude and task Tom Hardy with hamming up many of the responses to the fight within. Essentially, the film wants Venom to be Spider-Man rather than Venom. Its greatest influence seems to be Sam Raimi's, not because Venom appears in that movie but because it's the most brash and playful of the three. Tom Hardy doesn't quite seem to know what to do with the part, seeming equally confused as the audience as he never really gets the journalist Eddie character off the ground and struggles to find the proper beat and cadence for inhabited Eddie. Rather than work hard to deal with the war raging inside, Hardy and the script gloss over the more complex components in favor of humor and action built around stock parts and a transparent story that becomes even more so as the film develops its tone and finds its voice.