Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is a journalist who has made a name for himself on various revelations. One day, his boss calls him in and asks Eddie to do an interview with Life Foundation Corporation CEO Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed). Only, the chief says, come on, Eddie, this time without your stupid provocations. We need cooperation with Drake, so only “Why are you busy saving humanity” and “What are your creative plans.”
Why the boss sends Eddie, who is known for his tough approach and deliberate provocations, to this interview is not clear, but maybe this boss is just an imbecile?
And before the interview, Eddie got into the computer of his girlfriend Ann Waying (Michelle Williams), the prosecutor, found confidential materials about the Life Foundation there, and in an interview with Drake, he unobtrusively asked why so many people die in his corporation while testing drugs. Well, just a question for show.
Of course, Eddie was kicked in the ass first by Drake, then by the authorities – he was kicked out of the canal, and then by Ann – she kicked him out of her house.
Why Brock did this, although he knew exactly how it would all end, is not clear, but maybe this Eddie is just an idiot?
Now Eddie lives in a shabby little room, in the room opposite him there is always loud music playing, he is unshaven, smells bad, and his prospects are completely hopeless. But at some point, he was contacted by a Life Foundation employee, Dr. Dora Skirt (Jenny Slate), who told a terrible thing.
It turns out that Drake sent a ship into space that managed to get four extraterrestrial symbiotic life forms. During the landing, the ship crashed, one symbiote escaped somewhere, but the other three went to Drake. And now he is trying to cross symbiotes with people, although people are dying like flies.
Dora Skirt is ready for anything: she will take Eddie to Drake’s terribly secret laboratory so that he can open everyone’s eyes to this flayer. Yes, Dora knows that her betrayal will definitely be revealed and her life after that will not be worth a penny, but maybe she’s just weak-minded?
And then the full fun began. Eddie in the laboratory picked up either the flu, or the genome, or the vein, or the symbiote, which will now frolic in his body. And Eddie will frolic with him. Will the Earth be in terrible danger now?! AND HOW!!!
***
With this “Venom” the story was long and rather muddy. Sony Corporation, which was painful to see how Marvel and DC abundantly skimmed the cream of every movie epic about the universe of superheroes, took out a loan and bought the rights to some characters from Marvel Studios. Sony’s Spiderman alone wasn’t enough, and they decided to launch a new standalone franchise in the form of a spin-off of Spider-Man 3: Enemy in Reflection, starring Eddie Brock and his alter ego Venom. He was then played by Topher Grace.
The development of the project began in 2007, but filming started in October 2017. Ruben Fleischer, the creator of the cute parody of zombies “Welcome to Zombieland” and the stupid action movie “Gangster Hunters”, was put in the director’s chair.
The five writers were inspired by the Marvel comics Venom when writing the script, Tom Hardy was inspired by, as stated in promotional materials, Woody Allen, Conor McGregor and Redman, the filmmakers were inspired by the work of directors John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, as well as the films American Werewolf in London” and “Ghostbusters”.
That, in fact, is why they turned out such garbage, because if you are inspired by Woody Allen and Conor McGregor at the same time, then it will blow you to pieces.
Why bullshit? For several reasons. First. The script is below the plinth. I have said many times that even in comics pictures there must be some kind of internal logic. But here it is not as a class: a blunder sits on a blunder and drives with a blunder. There is no clear motivation for the characters at all. Yes, there are film comics where a slight madhouse is also going on with the script, but when you don’t notice this at least while watching, it’s already good. This is not the option here.
With action, and this is the main thing for which film comics are usually filmed, everything here is more than modest. Almost all the action scenes are abridged in the trailer. A couple of fights of Hardy’s character with a symbiote inside, filmed with very coarse grinding and not to say that with impressive graphics, one and only more or less dynamic motorcycle chase with equally unimpressive graphics. Well, I don’t even want to talk about the final Chukalovo: in terms of cartoonishness and tedious flickering, it was comparable to some regular “Transformers”.
However, Tom Hardy somewhat saves the case. He is a wonderful actor, versatile and charismatic. His tandem with the symbiote nevertheless blossomed with several funny jokes that at least a little save this bucket of green melancholy. And Hardy is good here: he squeezes everything he can out of a completely sterile movie theater stuffed with solid movie stamps.
Glavgad (in which an allusion to Elon Musk is easily captured – how do you like it, Elon Musk?) is so cardboard – purely scripted – that instead of actor Riz Ahmed, you could easily put a piece of cardboard with a painted face – it would be no worse. But this is not a claim to the actor, but to the script. Well, the final scene, where good to hell slurps evil – it is quite in the paradigm of nightmarish punching and cardboard characters.
The good actress Michelle Williams has absolutely nothing to play here, and that she ran through almost the entire film in a touching plaid school skirt – here, I think, is a big flaw that a crowd of naked lustful Japanese did not chase after her, this is just their favorite topic!
Many reviewers blame Sony for the fact that they, they say, for the sake of the PG-13 rating, made the picture too toothless: on the screen, it seems that all sorts of fights and vile alien creatures overwhelm entire police squads, but brains don’t fly out, blood doesn’t shed in liters, because everything well remember about the rating.
However, I believe that if they had made an R rating, then this product would not have helped much: well, ketchup would pour in liters, and so what? It’s not about the blood, but about the level of the picture itself. (However, Hardy in one of the interviews somehow let slip that almost forty minutes were cut out of the picture for the sake of the rating, and these were the best forty minutes of the film.)
Well, I must say that during my viewing, the “dog comes out” trigger worked for me: on stage, when the symbiote from the only survivor of the shipwreck moved first into a paramedic lady, then into an Asian grandmother and then into a little girl, the cat Bublik got up with sofa and went to the kitchen to look for something to eat: as much as possible, we ate these “invasions” back in the eighties, that’s enough for us!
What is the result? Some kind of complete garbage, where almost everything is bad, except for Tom Hardy and his internal negotiations with an alien garbage that speaks excellent English (garbage, by the way, was voiced by Tom Hardy himself). Watching this, in general, is boring and uninteresting, and if we imagine that this film is the beginning of an entire franchise, then we really don’t give a damn about it, because we are unlikely to continue watching this madhouse.
We have completely different examples of the comics genre – an order of magnitude more fun, witty and provocative. Here, too, there is some kind of sterile stamped melancholy, which Tom Hardy, although partially pulls out, but only the head, and the whole body remains in a particular swamp.
And now, Bublik, about the main thing. Critics swore in smoke, the rating on IMDB for an expensive blockbuster is very, very mediocre. What about money, money? So, money, this garbage collected $853 million for a $100 million budget, that is, it has an absolutely gorgeous CCC of 8.5 (from 3 – it has already paid off normally). And what does Sony have to do with the moaning of critics, flying tomatoes and the worst thing – condemnation by us and the cat Bagel? Fuck them completely. The picture has earned a lot of money, which means that we are waiting for new adventures of the elusive venoms, a symbiote in their drawbar.
Venom movie meaning
Director: Ruben Fleischer Cast: Tom Hardy, Woody Harrelson, Riz Ahmed, Jenny Slate, Michelle Williams, Scott Hayes, Reid Scott, Melora Walters, Peggy Lu, Malcolm Es Murray
Budget: $100 million, Global gross: $853 million
Fantasy thriller, USA-China, 2018, 112 min.