Venom

I would like to say that in places Tom Hardy acts as poorly as Ben Affleck in Daredevil or Edward Norton in The Incredible Hulk, but that wouldn't be true. His performance is much closer to Nicolas Cage in Ghost Rider. In places it’s so bad that it's fun. I really wasn't sure if Hardy was grimacing because it's supposed to be funny, or because it's supposed to be serious (but in doing so, it's just inadvertently funny). The film is not terrible, but it is no gem either. I didn't mind at all, for example, that it didn't splash blood and heads were not flying, I much prefer it when filmmakers work with hints. The action scenes were quite solid (especially the one with the tactical unit) and the villain was also decent. Worse, however, was that everything in Venom seemed terribly hurried, and when the “grand finale" came, I almost didn't recognize it. (06/10/2018)

Hardy would be funny even if he played a used roll of toilet paper. This is true even in a film that is written and composed as cumbersomely as Venom. Something is being prepared for a very long time and quite illogically, then everything is revealed and resolved very quickly. The disobedient film works thanks to Hardy's charm. But it is on pretty thin ice. (24/10/2019)

Following on from conflicting mixed reviews, I didn’t expect much, and in the end, Venom is just sort of OK – which slightly irritates me because this film could have been much better. This is due in part to the limits of a PG-13 certificate, so scenes intended to be gory are either cut so that you can’t see the gore, or made in a ridiculous way of not showing blood (for example, a symbiote turns its limbs into sharp blades, but does not slice up their opponents; instead he throws them on the side). The plot is nothing new – it’s a relatively engaging origin story with, unfortunately, a completely generic and uninteresting villain played by Riz Ahmed. At times, the logic is lost, like when Venom tells Eddie that he was in his head and knows everything about him, but then five minutes later he asks who Anne is. Paradoxically, the film works best as a comedy with Tom Hardy humorously muttering and fooling around, which is a fail if Venom is intended as a darker film – because it isn’t. (09/01/2019)

Tom Hardy has a problem, an alien parasite has attached itself to him and wants to start eating people, but there are some worse monsters out there, so Eddie Brock and Venom decide to join forces and become the most ordinary of superheroes. Venom manages to adapt a potentially interesting and darker character into a jaded hero who looks like a relic of the past and could have captured the attention of maybe twelve years ago. I don't really know what to praise about it, even the best elements of it are mediocre at best. (05/10/2018)

Sometimes I'm happy to be wrong. And I haven't been so wrong for a long time as when I was proclaiming that Tom Hardy, with his certain type of grim expression, could in no way be a suitable Eddie Brock. But he is not only good in the role of a talkative stubborn person, he is excellent. When combined with the thankfully presented second voice in his head, the comedic potential of the resulting situations, and the imaginative action scenes, Venom is a surprisingly enjoyable bit of entertainment. I would obligatorily send the authors of reviews that qualitatively equate the efforts of the Sony stable with the level of such bombs from the beginning of the century as Elektra or The Punisher to go fetch the DVDs of the aforementioned films and refresh their memory. (10/10/2018)