I haven’t reviewed any movies in awhile, but to be fair I’m the Lazy Film Critic not the Motivated Film Critic. For my glorious return we have the Tom Hardy vehicle Venom to discuss. Yes, another comic movie. Ninety-four percent of movies are now comic movies, and I don’t think I can take it anymore. Let’s power through this, shall we? Venom is loosely (and I mean VERY LOOSELY) based on the Spider-Man villain. Through various property rights chicanery Sony has created a stand alone version that looks the same if you sorta squint.

Investigative reporter Eddie Brock is a tough, if marble mouthed and unkempt, investigate reporter who plays by his own rules. His capitalist media masters attempt to curtail his integrity when he is tasked with interviewing med-tech bro Steve Jobs type Dr. Carlton Drake. While he’s the darling of the public, Brock discovers Drake has a history of shady human trials on his medication and confronts him during the puff piece interview. Unsurprisingly, this costs Brock his job from the spineless MAINSTREAM MEDIA and costs him is relationship as well. Unbeknownst to everyone, Brock was completely right. Drake had alien symbiote lifeforms brought back to Earth, and had started trying to bond them with homeless people (classic villain move.) When a Drake employee wanting to expose the trial sneaks Brock in to expose what’s happening, Brock himself is inadvertently bonded with an alien. From this, Venom is born. It’s not exactly Secret Wars #8, but what can you do?

After this we basically have the movie Upgrade. (A movie I hated. One of my finer Dickbutt photoshops, though. Read my vitriol here.) Upgrade’s star even looks like Tom Hardy. Venom can talk to and control Eddie Brock much like the computer chip controlled fake Tom Hardy. The computer chip was owned by some tech billionaire. Venom was brought to Earth by a tech billionaire. You get the idea. Also, Venom turns into a buddy film where they occasionally eat the brains of the bad guys. There’s really more crackin’ wise going on than anything, and tons of physical slapstick comedy. Somehow Venom, an alien from some unnamed planet, is also a standup comedian. It may have been the theater, but when Venom was fully on screen he was even harder to understand than Tom Hardy is usually. It has to be a conscious effort for Hardy to star in movies where he’s completely unintelligible at this point.

Through various machinations unimportant for the review, Venom has to face an even stronger symbiote named Riot. I then remembered this was all a take on the 1990s Venom comic mini-series Lethal Protector. Did issue one have a chromium cover? You know it did! Was the series good? Not at all! Venom was easily the most popular villain of Marvel’s flagship superhero, Spider-Man, and they wanted to cash in. So, of course they try to turn him into an anti-hero good guy. Trying to piggyback on the success of Venom and his offspring Carnage in the comics, the series introduced four or five other symbiotes. It was a feckless cash grab, and the symbiotes were terribly lame. I hated it then, and I’m still not much of a fan now. Look for my review of that when I fire up Lazy Terrible 90s Comic Critic. I digress. The final fight in the movie between Venom and Riot actually reminded me of the first Hulk movie where he fights the mutant dogs. That’s PROBABLY not what you want to be reminded of when watching a comic movie. They attempt to mask budget CGI in darkness, and that doesn’t work when they’re already giant, formless blobs on the screen. In summary, this movie is worth watching hungover on a Saturday afternoon while nursing a headache, and the remote is just out of reach.

40 year old me gives Venom:

15 year old me gives Venom:

 

AFTER SCREEN CREDITS BONUS MINI-REVIEW!

Way back in August I saw Ant-Man and the Wasp, and loved it so much I never got around to reviewing it. This is what I remember. Sometimes he’s small. Sometimes he’s really big. Sometimes the ants are small. Sometimes the ants are big. He fights someone. Oh, a villain who can disappear and reappear. And it’s also a race against TIME. See it, don’t see. Whatever.

40 year old me gives Ant-Man and the Wasp:

15 year old me:
“They made an Ant-Man movie? Why?”