Review: Venom
Film : Venom
Cast: Tom Hardy, Riz Ahmed, Michelle Williams, Jenny Slate, Reid Scott, Scott Haze and others
Director: Ruben Fleischer
Venom, the first instalment of Sony’s Marvel Universe, is reasonably entertaining and highly unpredictable.
The film is about an enterprising and altruistic journalist Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy), who isn’t scared to ask the right questions, even if it means posing them to the rich and the powerful. He chooses to take on Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), a brilliant and ambitious scientist, who also happens to be the founder of the Life Foundation. To the world, Drake is a powerful genius who is working to create breakthroughs in the field of medicine. Or at least, that is what they are made to believe. To Eddie Brock, he is a conman who has something dangerously serious to hide although Brock does not have concrete evidence to nail him.
After an extremely tough interview session, Drake decides to come down hard on Eddie. As expected, Drake pulls a few strings and manages to get Eddie fired from his publication. Without a job and with his girlfriend leaving him, Eddie is disheartened. He decides to keep to himself and tries not to be concerned about problems affecting his neighbours and friends. It is at this point when he has almost given up that one of the scientists working in Drake’s Life Foundation comes to him with a crucial piece of information. She informs Eddie that Drake is attempting to infuse alien life forms called symbiotes into human beings and that Drake believes that if the symbiotes, which is the higher living form when compared to humans, can be infused into human beings then, the combined human-symbiote can reside in both earth and in space from where the alien species hails. However, the problem is that he is using the poor and the homeless to run the tests and in the process killing scores of them.
A conscientious Eddie can’t let this go unchallenged and he decides to return to the facility to collect evidence. However, unfortunately, a symbiote called Venom which has been captured and kept in the facility infuses itself into him when he goes there to investigate.
On the positive side, Venom’s strength empowers Eddie. On the flipside, Venom has a ravenous appetite and has a preference for live creatures (read humans). However, with time, both Eddie and Venom arrive at an understanding and agree to mutually co-exist. It is then that Eddie realises that just as how Venom has found him, Drake has been found and possessed by a much more powerful symbiote that has some really wicked plans in store. He understands that he is the only person who can now stop Drake from killing the planet…
The film is entertaining from start to finish although it lacks the class of the other Marvel films. Nevertheless, it is a clean, action adventure that can be enjoyed by the whole family. Tom Hardy looks comfortable playing the altruistic Eddie Brock while Riz Ahmed excels at playing Carlton Drake. The story is full of twists and turns and you are kept guessing as to what will happen next for a good part of the movie. It is only towards the fag end that you are able to predict how this will end. In short, Venom is definitely worth a watch.
p.s: The highlight is that at the end of the film, one gets to have a sneak peek at the sequel to the film, in which Eddie Brock along with Venom will take on an incarcerated individual, known more for his viciousness than his human nature. Also, don’t leave before you catch a glimpse of the upcoming film Spiderman, the trailer of which is being screened at the end of the film.
