Dir: Ruben Fleischer; Starring: Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Riz Ahmed, Jenny Slate. 15 cert, 112 mins.

Perhaps the hardest thing to process about Venom – and allow me to warn you that this is not an easy film to process in general – is the sheer ugliness of Venom himself. Sony Pictures appear to have lavished a nine-figure sum on, and are now hoping to establish an entire cinematic universe on the back of, a character who looks like someone drizzled Creme Egg filling onto a bin bag.

For those unschooled in the history and lore, Venom is a blob-like alien “symbiote” who gives his hosts largely tendril-based superhuman powers, and who was created in the mid-1980s as a means of jazzing up Marvel’s Spider-Man line.

As drawn by Todd McFarlane, he was immediately iconic: a mix of all-in wrestler, goblin shark and silverback gorilla, with a smashed piano grin and grasping, Nosferatu claws.

But as seen in Ruben Fleischer’s film, he is a jumbled CG eyesore – one of the most flatly unprepossessing digital creations the superhero craze has yet to cough up. And things are made more confusing still by a deeply eccentric central performance from Tom Hardy as Venom’s human host, the investigative journalist Eddie Brock, whom the Mad Max and Dunkirk star plays in a well-meaning but hapless style that suggests Norman Wisdom in the lead role of The Fly.