Venom

Everything good about this movie is actually thanks to Tom Hardy. This Marvel movie would have ended up in the abyss of history without Tom Hardy and nobody would have ever remembered it. In this way, however, it’s a decent introduction of a new character of the Marvel universe, but it pays brutally for the naïve screenplay. While I accepted the fact that Venom is actually a distant cousin of the Goa'ulds from Stargate SG-1, I really struggled with accepting the simplicity of the screenplay, according to which the tired and disappointed Tom Hardy meets with his buddy Venom. Riz Ahmed isn’t a completely dignified adversary for Venom either; he’s rather an easy ticket into our world, which he surprisingly grew to like. Being a crazy scientist is quite a popular topic which doesn’t get old easily. What could get old are the typical tropes Marvel is already full of. Thankfully, Venom is strong because of Tom Hardy and even Venom himself understood that. And at least because of that I have a reason to look forward to the next installment. (08/10/2018)

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)

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)

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)

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)