A fun, yet uninspired adaptation
This movie delivers on spectacle, but is sorely lacking in most other areas.
I’ll be the first to admit that I did not go into this film with high expectations. The trailers were not particularly exciting to me, and I hadn’t heard many good things about it. On top of this, Venom is usually a villain or supporting character in a Spider-Man film, so making a film about him without Spider-Man did not seem like a good foundation for a movie.
After seeing it, I can say that I was right not to get my hopes up. While I don’t think it’s especially bad, it isn’t very good, either. Some of the characters seemed promising- Eddie, for example, could have been a very well developed character, and that potential was used to some degree.
But other characters seemed entirely unbelievable to me. Dr. Carlton Drake, the film’s main villain, was portrayed as simply being comically evil in every scene he was in, with almost no defining traits other than cruelty and egotism.
On top of this, he, like Eddie, uses a symbiote to transform into a creature called Riot, perpetuating one of my least favorite tropes in superhero movies: A villain who is simply an evil version of the hero. This trope works sometimes, but at this point it has been used ad nauseam and I would prefer to see greater variation.
Without getting into spoilers, I also found the plot as a whole to be rather uninspired, as most of the film was fairly predictable and nothing caught my attention as being exceptionally exciting.
In my opinion this movie deserves a 6/10. It may be entertaining at times, but unfortunately I found it largely generic and mediocre.
Watch the trailer for Venom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLCn88bfW1o
The Film Review 