There’s a line near the end of Venom—and I assure you this is not a spoiler, because nothing inherently surprising or interesting happens in this film—where the alien symbiote that has attached itself to Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock tells its host why it has decided to save the world. “I’m a loser like you,” Venom tells Brock (or something to that effect).

And I couldn’t agree more.

Eddie Brock is an unsympathetic gotcha journalist who seemingly aspires to be a Jake-Gyllenhaal-in-Nightcrawler type, but he's more like a SoCal TMZ bro with a camera than an investigative reporter. He has some unknown grudge against the Life Foundation, a tech company run by Riz Ahmed's Elon Musk-esque villain Carlton Drake, and wants to bring it down. Unfortunately, he’s bad at his job, and without any credible sources, he decides to break into his lawyer fiancée’s computer and steal information about a case she’s working on that involves the Life Foundation. He brings his cameras to confront Drake without a shred of actual evidence, and gets himself (rightfully!) fired. He gets his fiancée fired, too, and she (rightfully!) breaks off the engagement. This all happens within about 10 minutes of the movie, along with a "science spaceship" crash that results in one of its specimens going missing by taking over some scientist’s body.

Frank Masi

Eventually, Brock breaks into the Life Foundation’s lab, where he accidentally gets some goo on him that infects him with Venom: a parasite that doesn’t like to be called a parasite, and who doesn’t so much as give Brock superpowers as it does use his body to do shit. From there, it’s a showdown between Brock/Venom and Drake—who has bonded with his own symbiote, "Riot." Drake is trying to use the space symbiote to destroy the world, I guess? But it never really feels like anything is at stake since we don’t learn the purpose of these alien things until the last 20 minutes of the movie.

Venom is bad, often boring, and feels like sort of bizarre mix between DC's dark grittiness and Marvel's light, comedy-adjacent style. It’s also kind of neither of these things. I couldn’t understand what were supposed to be jokes, as the entire audience in the press screening—including myself—was laughing at moments that were absolutely not jokes.

Frank Masi

Even the action was incomprehensible. It mostly consists of random tar shooting out of Hardy's body, while he gets thrown around like sock full of D-batteries in a prison fight. The same goes for the Venom "character" itself: Venom is kind of bad, but he’s also kind of good. His intentions are basically just to stay alive until he somehow develops an appreciation for humans (wrong!) and wants to help Brock save them. None of this is actually depicted in the film, though. We never actually see this character, or Brock, develop over the course of nearly two hours. By the end, I was rooting for Riot, who intends to destroy humanity.

It's perhaps a saving grace that Tom Hardy is in this movie, despite an inexplicable accent (a mumbling combination of American accents mixed with a British one, that sometimes comes across as a midwest newscaster voice). Much of the movie consists of him walking around feeling sick, and talking to himself, and I can't imagine what would have happened if another actor—maybe someone not so famously good at playing insane characters—were cast as the lead.

Sony Pictures Entertainment

In 2007, Spider-Man 3 set the bar unbelievably low for bringing the Venom character to the big screen. That dorky, embarrassing entry nearly killed Spider-Man’s chances of appearing in a movie again. Going into this film, I had the general sense that at least it wouldn’t be as bad as Spider-Man 3. I was wrong! At least Spider-Man 3 had Spider-Man in it. Venom’s rival never once makes an appearance in this film, and it’s unclear, given the business of Big Superhero, if it ever will. This leaves Venom in a confusing and inconsequential place in the Spider-Man universe.

It should be telling that even an Eminem song written for this film—with the lyrics “Venom, adrenaline momentum / Venom, not knowin’ when I’m ever gonna slow up”—isn’t even the worst part of the movie. The only thing Venom truly gets right is that line from the titular alien symbiote: Eddie Brock is a loser, and Venom is a loser. And this movie is one, too.

Matt Miller Culture Editor Matt is the Culture Editor at Esquire where he covers music, movies, books, and TV—with an emphasis on all things Star Wars, Marvel, and Game of Thrones.

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