Venom (2018)

I was sucked into another comic book superhero movie by the strange mash of reports coming of it. At first the cacophony looked like the familiar divide of critics and audience. That's confirmed for me anecdotally by two review sites I follow regularly, Tim Brayton writing at Alternate Ending and Christy Lemire at RogerEbert.com, who both hated it, whereas notwithstanding it owned most of October at the box office. Presently it appears to be busy preparing to break further records but we'll see. Some of the chatter made me think word of mouth is having its way here. Then somebody somewhere on social media described it as more like a romantic comedy and that was good enough for me. I went. Understand that Venom is the first movie of a franchise that exists in some "other" "new" Marvel universe, but don't ask me because I don't care about these byzantine continuity issues. Maybe Venom feels so fresh and spontaneous because it's not encumbered with them. Or maybe it feels that way to me because I so rarely go to comic book superhero movies. But I did find Venom hugely entertaining, reminiscent in some ways of The Mask with Jim Carrey—basic strokes of slapstick, mad scientists, aliens from outer space, a spectacular auto chase across San Francisco (one of the best I've ever seen and I've seen Bullitt), a comforting if patently ridiculous moral compass, and, yes, a romantic comedy, a funny one. Which transmutes into a feel-good buddy movie, also funny. Or actually, the romantic comedy between a man (Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock) and a woman (Michelle Williams as Anne Weying) is more like rudely interrupted by a buddy movie between a man (Brock) and a symbiotic alien (Hardy in booming throaty inside-the-head voiceover). It's easier for me to think of it that way. The ultraviolent impulses of the alien life form, which inhabits the bodies of human beings—this is also a bit of a disgustingly biological science fiction horror movie in the mode of Alien—are thus tempered by the comforting framework. It's not a contest of wills between human being and terrifying alien so much as a roommate situation where the pals have a lot of natural chemistry in their clownish wisecracking superhero lifestyle. Yet inevitably they chafe in ways that lead to laugh lines that worked for me. After Venom has killed about 20 or so nefarious over-armed corporate henchmen in an apartment brawl, for example, he says, "Outstanding! Now let's bite off all their heads and pile them up in the corner." Host Brock is disgusted by the very idea. "Why would we do that?" he asks. "Because," Venom says, "a pile of bodies and a pile of heads." In Marvel terms, Venom for me was a lot funnier and sharper than Guardians of the Galaxy, though maybe not quite up to the comedy highs of Deadpool. Even the Stan Lee cameo is above average. Obviously it's Marvel's universe now. We just live here.