Venom

Last night I thought I was going to see a fun new entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Not so much because Venom is merely "in association with" Marvel and, frankly, it is a disaster.  Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is an investigative reporter assigned to interview Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), the CEO of a bioengineering company called the Life Foundation, but this interview goes badly and Brock is fired.  He also loses his fiancee Anne (Michelle Williams) because he uses confidential information from her email to confront Drake (her law firm represents Drake).  It turns out that Drake, fearing the inevitable destruction of the Earth, has sent a rocket into space to look for other inhabitable worlds and has found symbiotic lifeforms.  When the rocket crash lands in Malaysia, one of the symbiotes escapes and the rest are brought to the Life Foundation where Drake tries, unsuccessfully, to achieve symbiosis with various test subjects.  Dr. Dora Skirth (Jenny Slate), a scientist working with Drake who has second thoughts about the ethics of testing subjects against their will, contacts the down-and-out Brock to offer him evidence of what has been going on.  With her help, Brock breaks into the Life Foundation and accidentally achieves symbiosis with one of the lifeforms named Venom.  Drake attempts to get Venom, now working in tandem with Brock, back until the other symbiote, named Riot, travels from Malaysia and achieves symbiosis with him.  This leads to an epic confrontation between Brock/Venom and Drake/Riot.  The script is a convoluted mess, jumping from scene to scene without much cohesion, and it is filled with dialogue that is meant to be witty banter between Brock and Venom but, for some reason, it just didn't work for me.  Maybe it is the tone because many of these quips and one-liners happen during scenes of intense mayhem and destruction (I think Upgrade does a better job in achieving a tonal balance because it doesn’t take itself seriously).  I also found the character of Brock to be very inconsistent because, initially, he is a hard-hitting and intelligent journalist so the slapstick between him and Venom comes out of nowhere.  I really like both Tom Hardy and Michelle Williams but, in my opinion, they give unusually bad performances.  Hardy is so weirdly frenetic that watching him was exhausting and Williams is clearly just phoning it in.  There are some really cool action sequences, especially a motorcycle chase through the streets of San Francisco and a fight between Venom and an entire SWAT team in the lobby of a building, but that is not enough to keep this from being a big disappointment.  I recommend giving it a miss.

Note:  I had thought of skipping this movie and seeing A Star Is Born again.  Clearly I made the wrong choice.