Venom is all teeth, no bite

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This article was published 06/10/2018 (2579 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Based on a minor, morally fluid Marvel Comics character, Venom isn’t a good movie, exactly, being a sloppily scripted, unevenly executed tonal mess. But star Tom Hardy, going all in on his double performance, manages goofy energy and off-kilter unpredictability that’s rare in superhero blockbusters these days.

Hardcore Venom fans might be, uh, miffed by this Spider-Man-free standalone adventure. But casual viewers might enjoy the movie if they just look at it as a buddy comedy.

You know, kind of a sweet story about a regular guy and the alien symbiotic pal who co-inhabits his body, talks into his head and needs to feed on human organs.

Hardy, being about as un-Bane-like as possible, plays Eddie Brock, an investigative journalist in San Francisco who loses everything — his network job, his gal Anne (Michelle Williams), his nice apartment, his will to shower and change his clothes — after asking some awkward questions about visionary billionaire Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed).

Drake is an Elon Musk/Steve Jobs type with a God complex and a casual attitude to experimental human trials. His privately funded space program has retrieved samples of amorphous alien life forms that Drake calls Symbiotes.

These slithery beings need to bond with human hosts to survive in Earth’s atmosphere. The bonding sessions — involving long waiver forms and vulnerable homeless people — are not going well.

Eddie, now a washed-up, unemployable journalist, gets a tip about these goings-on, infiltrates Drake’s labs and ends up with a Symbiote inside him, a chaotically impulsive creature that calls itself Venom.

Just don’t refer to Venom as a parasite. He’s very tetchy about that word, seeing it as a species-ist slur.

The Symbiote gives Eddie superhuman speed, strength and weird stretchy powers, but also an inconvenient need to bite people’s heads off — literally. Eddie gives the Symbiote a pesky core of human morality.

The two spend a lot of time negotiating, between motorcycle chases, ka-clunking down San Francisco’s iconically steep streets, and massive, multi-person pileup fights.

The action is gleefully violent, sometimes gratuitously nasty but never broody or dark.

The Venom character, who has been variously presented in the comics as anti-hero, semi-villain or “lethal protector,” is now basically a bickering but affectionate comedy double act.

Hardy does some really eccentric work. He’s been given a two-for-one portrayal before, playing both Kray brothers in the crime drama Legend.

Here, he handles the conflicted, special-effects-laden mashup of a well-meaning human and an often hilariously feral alien with loosey-goosey panache.

Even before Eddie meets up with his Symbiote friend, he’s kind of a mumble-mouthed, shambly loser. After the fusion, he becomes a sweaty, muttering, ravenously hungry mess.

In one memorably anarchic scene, he wrecks an upscale restaurant, jumping into the lobster tank, grabbing a live crustacean and chowing down.

With his admirably original performance, Hardy is committed to the comic potential of Eddie-Venom’s predicament. Unfortunately, director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) and the scripting gang (Jeff Pinkner, Scott Rosenberg and Kelly Marcel) can’t quite keep up. What might have been a sharp critique of the comic-book genre’s tendency to thudding predictability is undone by a few too many tired tropes.

Oh, and make sure to stay for the end credits. If this Venom movie doesn’t do it for you, the next one might.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca