Venom Wearing Denim

Venom (2018) is the second try at a Venom movie, this time without Spider-man.

This starts with Riz Ahmed’s space vehicle crashing in the Malaysian jungle. Ahmed is playing a kind of Elon Musk character, which seems to be everyone’s current go-to villain. I wonder if that bugs him. Everyone aboard dies, but some biological samples are recovered - and one escapes. It takes over a native and starts walking to the airport.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is living the good life. He is in a great relationship with corporate attorney Michelle Williams. He is some kind of YouTube investigative journalist, working for Ron Cephas Jones (Bobby Fish from Luke Cage). He is supposed to be doing a softball fluff piece on Ahmed, who Williams works for. So he peeks at her work laptop email, and finds out about some people who have gone missing. When he gets to the interview, he confronts Ahmed, and of course gets kicked out.

Then he finds out that he is fired, and that Williams was fired too, since she was the obvious source of the info. She throws him out, so now he’s unemployed, alone, and living in a Tenderloin SRO. Then Dr. Skirth (Jenny Slate), who works for Ahmed, comes to him with a story about weird experiments at the labs on the Marin headlands. (I had to look up her characters name: it sounded like Dr. Skirt or Scairt to me.) So Hardy goes to investigate, and gets taken over by the space symbiotic Venom.

Note that this is about 40 minutes into the movie, which is way too long to wait. Venom is violent and goofy and makes Hardy feel all funny. He goes to the restaurant where his ex and her new boyfriend, Dr. Reid Scott, are eating and makes a scene. It’s a nice that new boyfriend isn’t a jerk, but a nice and helpful guy, who tries to get some help for Hardy.

Anyway, we get some good action in here, some chase scenes, some fight scenes, some Venom eating people’s heads scenes. It all goes by too quickly - the whole movie is under 2 hours, with an extremely long end credits - and I don’t know if that counts the Into the Spider-Verse preview tacked onto the end.

Still, I’ve got to say this was a fun ride. Ms. Spenser loved Venom, because he was so metal. She liked a lot of the rest, but noted that Slate as Dr. Skirth was kind of wasted in a very small role. I noticed the same about Ahmed - he gets one or two character beats, and then just does exposition.

So, a good comic book movie - not top drawer, but better than the first five Sony Spider-Man movies. And, by the way, we’re watching Spider-Man 3 again as soon as I can get my hands on it.