(1.5 / 4)
Tonally jumbled, an abundance of plot contrivances, and a strange lead performance make ‘Venom’ far from a symbiotic experience. Especially for today’s viewer’s accustomed to the consistently top-quality superhero stories from the MCU.
The long-gestating Venom standalone film finally sees the light of day this weekend, and considering the extent to which superhero films have evolved over the last decade, the film is in a very crowded and competitive landscape. With the Marvel Cinematic Universe churning out endless high quality stories, the bar has never been higher for fledgling origin stories that are not explicitly connected to the MCU world. For Venom to thrive, it is essential that the story find a new angle to explore, and the idea of a protagonist with villainous tendencies could have fit the bill. Although the film does admittedly run with this approach, Venom is ultimately a failure due to how poorly constructed the film is, leaving one with the question “Why was this made?”