Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: A passable but lifeless story that, for reasons beyond me, tries to cast Tom Hardy as a loser.

I don’t want to get all Neil deGrasse Tyson on this movie, but it should have lasted only five minutes. Any vehicle that size that loses its heat shielding tiles upon reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere would burn up into tiny bite-size chunks and no human or alien could survive. This is especially true of aliens whose primary weakness happens to be fire. I’m glad I could get that off my chest.

Well, Marvel had a good run of fun, exciting, and worth watching movies. That streak has ended with “Venom”. This is a shame because giving villains their own backstory and their own motion picture vehicle is a great idea whose time has come. The problem is that Venom’s (Tom Hardy) motivations are minimally defined and kind of stupid and Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is the kind of good person who is really mostly just a dick pretending to be a good person when it suits him. Yes, Eddie Brock is Brett Kavanaugh. He even treats his girlfriend, Anne Weying (Michelle Williams), horribly. Come to think of it, the whole movie is basically about a being who nonconsensually invades people’s bodies and everyone around those people being mostly alright with it or afraid to speak up. Ugh. Did I just make this movie into a euphemism for rape culture? Even all the relationships are horribly dysfunctional! Anne inexplicably keeps Eddie in her life and helps him even though he shamelessly takes advantage of her and cruelly violates her trust. Eddie somehow learns to like having Venom inside him even though Venom is clearly using him. Gah! I have completely ruined this movie for me.

Ok, so, besides the whole “Marvel deciding to make a major motion picture whose lead character is a rapist” thing, there are parts of “Venom” that are fun. I couldn’t for a minute buy the whole Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock as a loser thing, but there was some good banter between Eddie and Venom at times and there are some legitimately funny moments. The action scenes are fun, though I could have done without the exploding on impact drones and the CGI is sometimes a little over used and hard to follow. The movie doesn’t quite know what to do with Michelle Williams, which is a shame because she is great. She should have her own superhero movie.

As I wrote the review, I came to the realization that I should probably have rated the movie two stars instead of three, but my rating is all the way at the top and here I am way down here at the end. The effort of changing it is too much for me. And really, three stars is an accurate assessment of my enjoyment level for the movie before I decided to let my brain take over and ruin my fun. I must now go try to kill it with alcohol. Oh, and you can probably skip “Venom”, though there’s almost certainly going to be a sequel and it’s going to star Woody Harrelson so I’ll probably end up going to see it because Woody Harrelson is delightful!