Venom

Tom Hardy’s comic performance is the only persuasive reason to sit through Venom, and it is not quite enough. Ruben Fleischer has a potentially funny pair in Eddie Brock and the symbiote that shares his body. Their bickering gives a familiar superhero origin story a few welcome moments of bad manners, and there is something endearing about their inability to leave one another alone. The action is muddled, though, and the creature is treated so cautiously that there is little danger in spending time with it.

Tom Hardy lets Eddie’s confusion affect his whole body. The twitchiness and awkward movement give the conversations with Venom a comic life beyond the lines, because Eddie never looks comfortable with what is happening to him. We laughed at the lobster-tank scene because he commits so completely to the indignity, without pausing to admire his own joke. His performance can become fussy, but that is preferable to the solemn business surrounding it.

The screenplay by Jeff Pinkner, Kelly Marcel and Scott Rosenberg gives the partnership too little room to develop. Characters make decisions that seem necessary only to get the next complication started, while the rules governing Eddie’s predicament remain frustratingly loose. Suspense is difficult to sustain when we cannot judge what anyone can do, or what might stop them. Michelle Williams as Anne Weying and Riz Ahmed as Carlton Drake have little chance to make their characters as interesting as Eddie’s running argument with himself.

Matthew Libatique’s cinematography briefly finds a memorable image at the Transamerica Pyramid. Elsewhere, computer-generated bodies dominate the action, which soon becomes anonymous despite all the movement. Oliver Scholl’s production design struggles to register beneath the digital activity, so the settings do little to distinguish one passage of combat from another. There is skill in making these creatures move, but the film keeps asking movement alone to provide excitement.

Alan Baumgarten and Maryann Brandon’s editing does little to settle the shifts between comedy and attempted seriousness. The story rushes through matters that need time to make sense, then gives the digital fighting more attention than it earns. Ludwig Göransson’s score presses for excitement without making those passages much more involving; it cannot do the work of a clearly staged action scene. The film runs for 112 minutes. We kept waiting for Eddie and Venom to start arguing again.

Judged as a superhero origin story, this is too cautious about the things that might make its central creature troublesome. The uneasy companionship promises some bad behaviour, but the film softens it until the attempted menace scarcely matters. Ruben Fleischer never settles how unpleasant, or how playful, he is prepared to let the pair become, and neither the jokes nor the fights benefit from the uncertainty. Come for Tom Hardy only if a handful of funny exchanges can justify a great deal of waiting.