Venom
*ing: Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Riz Ahmed, Scott Haze, Reid Scott
Rated: 6/10
Marvel, as we all know, is in the habit of pulling out new characters for the big screen from its old lot of comic book heroes. This one though is a step ahead — a human powered by a snaky and venomous but wholesomely humorous alien entity, or should we say a mass of amoebic matter with a yen for human liver, heart and intestines.
That, of course, is when he is not trying to make his presence felt as a loser in a loser. You get what I mean? Not really, but do go the cinemas to enjoy slower than usual superhero movie with Tom Hardy’s edgy existence all through the 2-hour film.
But it is not Hardy, the incorrigible investigative reporter who loses almost everything in life — consistently — due to his innate desire to investigate — and, of course, get into a soup from there is very little possibility of retrievable. Till he starts to live with it, it being the alien in him, his parasitic foe turned buddy turned existential partner.
Venom, as the alien entity which can shape up as an angry anaconda and a masked backed monster with a shark-like jaw line, is not so much about the poison and the fangs that he is expected to bare as it is about first the essentiality and then the fun of inhabiting a human body and slowly getting to like it.
The poison is more in a scientific spatial rogue that has no qualms of taking lives in his quest to find a synchronised human-alien race on Earth for future habitation commerce of another planet.
From a sticky green and black mass struggling to crawl out of a glass lab canister, it breaks out to inhabit humans giving them super powers as well as eventual death, all except Hardy who turns up with a disgusting appetite for everything live.
Zombieland director Robert Fleischer ad a big job at hand to bring to life yet another cavernous character out of the Marvel pages but he manages only some bits of exhilaration in a non-superhero movie which interest you enough but not entirely – not even half as visually grand as you would expect a Marvel mount to be and yet give enough to score as your optional poison for the week.