Review: Not Spiderman

I like going to the movies!

So what better way to reminisce going to the movies than by writing about your movie going experience!  Huzzah!  That’s enough exclamation points!  One more!  YES!

So I wasn’t sure about this movie for a while now.  Usually whenever you read rumblings of it having trouble you kind of shouldn’t expect much.  Not that it had production issues just the trailer was very underwhelming.  It didn’t turn out to be an R-rated movie which the character was pretty much designed.  And, I dunno, I just don’t trust Sony to be able to pull off doing a Marvel movie on their own.

So, without…oh…screw you.  Here’s my review of…Venom.

As I said, I went into the movie expecting little.  I wanted to see it because as a long time Spiderman fan I was really excited to see Venom get his due.  He was an amazing villain and I wanted to see what they were going to do with him.  There were a few things I didn’t like hearing in the months leading up to the movie’s release though:

• YAY LISTS!
• It wasn’t going to be rated R
  • How can Venom rip peoples head’s off without it being rated R?!
• There was only going to be a small bit of actual Venom in the movie
  • This ended up being BS and there was plenty of the symbiote, no matter how you pronounce that word.
• Sony was making it without Marvel’s help.  Their history of movies isn’t the greatest well to pull from.
• They wanted it to be stand alone meaning, no Spiderman.
  • This one, I think, is going to hurt it long term.

To combat this they did have a kick ass slogan though:

The world has enough superheroes.

That is pretty bad ass.  It presents itself as the anti superhero movie.  It can be such an amazing concept.  Instead of a movie with someone trying to save the world it’s a movie about someone trying to cause chaos in it.

Now, I liked the movie.  I thought it was fun.  Currently rotten tomatoes has it sitting at a 32%.  I think it was at least a 50%, and as I’ve said before there is nothing wrong with that.  The problem is that these types of movies are expected to blow the doors off of the box office and if they don’t they’re a failure.  They can’t just be a fun movie anymore.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat.

It was a fun movie.  Venom was awesome as the co-conspirator with Eddie Brock.  I could have watched him beat the crap out of army dudes all night long.  I wanted to see him bite more heads off of people.  I wish it was rated-R so he could have slashed some dudes up.  But it was still a fun, enjoyable movie.

I don’t know if this helped but right before going to see Venom I was watching The Phantom Menace, then the beginning of The Clone Wars.  Those two movies committed the cardinal sin of fun movies; they were boring.  Venom wasn’t boring.  It probably isn’t a movie I’ll search for when it comes out on Netflix.  I might have it on in the background if its ever on TV.  But it was fun while it lasted.

I guess that’s not the type of review studios want to hear though.  They want people to go back a third and fourth time.  This wasn’t that type of movie and there is nothing wrong with that.

I’ll go into what is wrong with that though in my movie review staple….THE LIST!

• The problem with the movie was that it missed in so many places that felt like it was lazy.  It could have been a great movie but the writers didn’t want to come up with a compelling story.  They even lied to us with the super catchy awesome slogan because all it turned out in the end was someone trying to save the world.  WTF?
• Cookie cutter bad guy.  Can we please stop with the evil geniuses trying to destroy the world?  The 80s died a long time ago, let their movie tropes die with it.
  • The Elon Musk-esque bad guy trope is being SO old as well.  Just…stop it.  Stop it.  Good god stop it.
    • This is going to be my new reason to wanting to become a writer.  To stop shitty screenplay writers from writing shitty movies.  Not that this movie was shitty but my fuck it was lazy in some parts.
• The movie is based in SF!  LOOK!  SF Landmarks!
  • I don’t know if movies that are filmed anywhere else feel as blatant when they point out a landmark but whenever I see a movie filmed in SF it always feels like they’re trying to ram down your throat that “HEY WE’RE IN SAN FRANCISCO” with all of their wide shots of the city and the Trans America Building and the Golden Gate Bridge.
  • When in SF you have to have a car chase driving down a steep hill so the cars go VROOM and jump way high up in the air.
    • Although this one was pretty cool on a motorcycle.  Motorcycle chases > car chases.
• Venom looked like fucking Venom.   That was awesome.
• No relation to Spiderman in a Venom movie seems wrong.  Like…really wrong.  Of course there are multiple Venom-esque origins but I always like the original one, or what I remember it was, that Eddie Brock was jealous of Peter Parker and the symbiote went from Spiderman to Brock after Peter got rid of it and that hatred manifested itself double-y in Venom which is why he became Spiderman’s biggest/baddest villain.
  • yeah, okay, whatever.  Venom’s changed over the years to become more of an anti-hero instead of a just bad guy.  But…come on.  There are bad guys with self-justified bad guy motives in the world.  We don’t need to turn all of the cool bad guys into sort of good guys.
• My thought when the movie opened and there were more than one symbiotes:  Please don’t make this a movie series where a bunch of Venoms just fight other Venoms.
  • -long drawn out sigh of disappointment
• Okay, Venom is a cool and kick ass name.  It’s evil sounding.  It’s mean.  It’s just…awesome.  But why do they all have to have their own names?  Why…I mean I guess I know why but holy shit.  Really?  Riot?  Come on.  Where’s Michael Bay and why does he have his hands in this script?  That seriously sounds like a shitty Transformer name.
  • I have a suggestion for a list of shitty symbiote names for sequels:
    • Crash
    • Crumple
    • Quartz (and it’ll be all like diamondy looking and unbreakable)
    • Rampage (so obvious I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an early script with this one actually in the movie.)
    • Slice
    • Dice
    • Frenzy
    • Lacerate
    • Break
    • Nuke
    • Mangle
• The scene with Venom and Eddie fighting the bad dude and Riot at the end and they got all tangled up in symbiote slime and were being pulled apart was fucking awesome.  That might have been the ONLY reason I would be willing to see it again in 3D.  I mean, I won’t.  No way.  Not worth it and I refuse to give up on my stance that 3D is bullshit but that would have had a chance to be pretty fucking cool.
• Very slow first hour of the movie.  Or I don’t know if it was the first hour but it was slow.
• The first post credit scene was awesome.  I knew what it was going to be as soon as it came on.  I kind of wish it wasn’t going that route so soon and been saved for something else but…holy shit yes.
• Eminem has a Venom song?  Ew.  No.  Go away.  Ew.
• Hilarious moment after the movie ended.  Guy and girl behind us.  They get up once the credits start rolling.  He says, “oh wait.  This is a marvel movie.”  She’s like “What?”  He then explains that at the end of Marvel movies they have a post credit scene.  Asks if she wants to stay.  She says sure and they sit back down.  When they sit down and the scene comes on the first part shows a building.  He proclaims to her, based on the building shown he thinks he knows who it is, “OMG…it’s the joker.”  I’m thinking…WTF?!  THE JOKER?!  You JUST said its a Marvel movie, dumb ass.  Good lord.
• Tom Hardy was good.  His accent was a little put on but whatever.
• The movie had a lot of funny moments.  I liked the back and forth between Eddie and Venom and their inner/outer dialogue.
• Venom dog!
• Venom lady!
  • What is wrong with me that venom lady was kind of hot.
• Venom little girl?
• Did I mention that the bad guy sucked?

So the movie was fun.  It had its bad moments and its good moments.  Over all it was enjoyable.  I think it’s going to hurt itself in the long run, if it wants to be a franchise and eventually team up against Spiderman though.  There won’t be any of that hostility between the two.  There won’t be a history that makes it mean something.  They took that away from the story by making it have its own origin, unless they keep them in separate universes and give Spiderman his own version of Venom.  I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

I give this movie 6 long slurping Venom tongues out of 10.  Would recommend.