97 min | PG-13 | October 1, 2021 | Columbia Pictures
Eddie Brock and his alien parasite are stuck in a bad domestic partnership. Then a serial killer gets his own symbiote and starts a war. The bickering is more fun than the carnage.
Eddie Brock shares his body with Venom, an alien symbiote with an appetite for human heads. The two have settled into a sour cohabitation that plays like a couple who should have split years ago. Eddie wants to land an interview with death row inmate Cletus Kasady. Venom wants to eat people and feel appreciated. The film is a buddy comedy about a man and the monster inside him, and the actual plot about a second symbiote called Carnage exists mostly to fill the space between the jokes.
Tom Hardy plays Eddie Brock as a sweaty wreck and voices Venom as a needy growling roommate, and he commits fully to both halves of the argument. The Eddie-Venom domestic squabbles are the engine of the movie. Woody Harrelson plays Cletus Kasady with a red wig and a theatrical menace that never builds into a real threat. Naomie Harris plays Frances Barrison, a sonic-screaming mutant named Shriek, and gets a thin love story instead of a character. Michelle Williams returns as Anne Weying and stands at the edge of the chaos with nothing to do.
Andy Serkis directs the symbiote effects with the eye of an actor who has spent his career inside motion capture. Kelly Marcel writes the script, and it sprints through its setup so fast that the villain origin lands in a single rushed sequence. The Carnage transformations are slick liquid tendrils, but the climactic fight collapses into a smear of digital tentacles where the two red-and-black creatures become impossible to read. A nightclub interlude where Venom leaves Eddie’s body and addresses a crowd is the one stretch where the direction and the comedy lock together. The pacing favors speed over weight, and the film ends before any of it accumulates.
This is a cartoon that knows it is a cartoon and refuses to pretend otherwise. It trades the brooding of a typical comic-book movie for slapstick and short scenes and a relentless desire to entertain. The cost is a villain with no menace and a story with no stakes. The mid-credits scene promises a bigger universe, which tells you the real ambition of the movie sits in the two minutes after it ends rather than the ninety before.