VENOM – A Review by Hollywood Hernandez
Venom is the new Marvel Comics movie that has everything you expect from a Stan Lee extravaganza, including a cameo appearance by Stan Lee. In Venom, Tom Hardy (from Dunkirk) plays an investigative TV news reporter who lets his journalistic curiosity get the best of him when he gets an assignment to do a "fluff piece" on a shady businessman who's involved in space exploration. His experiments with outer space life forms threaten the planet with superpowers that could take over Earth's human population.
Riz Ahmed plays the corrupt businessman who puts his company's profits over the safety of the people of Earth. When one of his spaceships crashes in Malaysia and one of the symbiotic creatures gets away and infects people until he travels all the way to San Francisco. Reporter Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) gets infected with the space creature and becomes Venom who, while far from a "hero", does heroic things in his battle with the wealthy business man's henchmen.
The Venom special effects are amazing and the special effects fight scenes are amazing but the movie gets off to a slow start. The movie has a run time of 1 hour and 52 minutes and it seems like it would have been a better movie if it had been tightened up to about 90 minutes. It's ironic that the real bad guy in the movie is the wealthy businessman and not the alien.
Venom has some pretty good dark humor; however, it's nowhere near the laughs in the Deadpool movies. This next round of Marvel movies is off to a slow start. How good future Marvel movies will be remains to be seen. (Also, remember to stay until the end of the credits for a bonus scene.) On my "Hollywood Popcorn Scale" this PG-13 movie rates a LARGE.
