Tom Hardy does his best to save "Venom": review

His Naughty Week here at Mashable. In honor of the Venom release, we are celebrating all of our favorite movie and TV thieves all week. Scary, scary!

The first act of Venom suggests that we are in one of the worst movies of 2018. Not in a fun way, notice it, but in this boring and disheartening way where lack of effort begins to give the impression of missing of respect.

Then Venom has his man and a movie that seemed at first just as bad becomes so bad, it's good. Or maybe it's just good. I have not seen the full day and honestly, I'm still not sure. Anyway, I laughed a lot.

The story centers on Eddie (Tom Hardy), an investigative journalist whose body is invaded by Venom, an alien parasite. The latter was brought to Earth aboard a spaceship belonging to Drake (Rice Ahmed), evil CEO, who always seeks to dominate the world or anything else. So, tl; dr: Eddie has Venom and Drake wants Venom, which means that Eddie (with Venom) spends most of the movie fleeing or fighting Drake and his henchmen.

That's the premise of the movie. But the point In the film, what interests most and what is most interesting, is the strange relationship that develops between Eddie and Venom.

I laughed for several minutes, but I can not tell you if the humor of this moment was entirely intentional.

Venom lives inside Eddie and hacks Eddie's body whenever he feels like it. With Venom in the driver's seat, Eddie beats henchmen, flies through the window and tears himself up in a restaurant in search of living creatures to devour. Hardy is very entertaining to watch here, his face rummaging with horror, amazement and exaltation as he watches his own body move in a way that he can neither understand and control.

It's even more entertaining once Eddie realizes that Venom is less interested in hurting him than in saving him, largely because Venom needs a host. Why this particular host, though? What makes Eddie so special? Venom makes a half-knacked attempt to offer a "scientific" explanation, but the real answer seems to be that this stranger, just … really loves Eddie.

Venom apparently views Eddie as a friend, even before Eddie completely addressed what was happening. This extremely dangerous alien opens to Eddie, discussing his goals, his weaknesses, his previous life on his home planet, his aversion to the word "parasite". He encourages Eddie to come to terms with his ex (Michelle Williams) and lends Eddie his super powers of another world at his request.

Their dynamic lies somewhere between "comedy buddy boyfriend" and "boy and his dog". It's oddly sweet when Venom confesses the real reason he wants to help Eddie save the situation, and also extremely hilarious. I laughed for several minutes, but I still could not tell you if the humor of that moment was entirely intentional. And oh, man, I did not even get to the party where Eddie take out with Venom.

The reason why it is so difficult to say with what funny Venom wants to be outside of the relationship between Venom and Eddie, for whom Hardy's physiognomy does most of the work, nothing about Venom suggests that it's smart enough or competent enough to be as funny on purpose.

The characters are all types of vague stock and a vague stock dialogue. One of Eddie's favorite platitudes is "Nothing Can not", and this is apparently meant to count as a personality trait. We know that many of them are supposed to be exceptionally brilliant because they are constantly repeating themselves, but none of them makes a little sense.

Personality and mood are also absent. Venom Make sure you know that it is in San Francisco, but shows no interest in the quirks or rhythms of the city. (Eddie, still the intrepid journalist, reports the latest news that homelessness is increasing "by the thousands!" You do not say.) He brings talented actors like Williams and Ahmed and asks them to do a reciting dialogue and look empty.

Venomafter a terribly tedious start, it is moving towards something surprising.

Where, then, the humor in Venom comes from? And if director Ruben Fleischer and his team were smart and committed enough to make the Eddie and Venom tracks as fun, where the heck was the energy for the rest of the film?

Maybe it does not matter. Whatever their intentions, the end result is that Venom, after a terribly tedious start, moves towards something really surprising. I found it strange and amusing and sometimes endearing, even as I feared awkward dialogue and covered my notebook in "WTF" every time the characters did something new and stupid.

It's like the most memorable phrase turn of Venom, "Turd in the wind". We do not know where it comes from or why it's here, and it's obviously very silly. (What's that like that? In what way is a poop in the wind different from a boogeying elsewhere?) But whatever you think of it, you have to l? admit: it was really good to laugh.

(Also, PS: Yes, there are generic scenes – two of them, and you will have to stay all the way through the end for the second.)