Spoilers, of course!
Over the weekend, Venom (dir. Ruben Fleischer) dominated the box office, raking in a gross $230 million worldwide, solidifying its status as the #1 movie in America. Despite it’s huge box office success, the initial critic reviews shed a much different light on the film. Venom only gained a 30% on the Tomatometer (a critic’s consensus rating- 100% is “certified fresh” and below 50% is certified rotten).
So I have to pose the question: why was the audience score at an 89% with such a negative critic rating?
As a film major, I often find myself feeling guilty for liking movies like Venom-they’re chaotic and noisy, and don’t have much sense in the ways of plot devices. For example, I would like to try and redeem the kiss between Eddie and Venom by passing it off as a hopeful additive to the Eddie/Anne redemption arc, but in reality it was just really weird. Another example is the final fight scene between Venom and Riot, which was designed to be an intense and chaotic battle of dominance, was ultimately just hard to watch after so many layers of dynamic CGI renderings. My head actually hurt after the first few seconds of it because there was just so much going on, visually speaking. But scattered throughout the scene there were moments where Tom Hardy delivered hilarious dialogue that helped break up the intensity. These kinds of hopeful moments gave Venom such a low critic rating. It’s hard to redeem these visual faults in a review of what makes a “good” movie, when the term dictates a sense of superiority over what makes it a “fun” movie.
A “good” movie has an innate tone of superiority in film culture. We associate directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, and James Cameron with what we classify as “good” movies for a number of reason- visuals being one of them. Visually speaking, Venom was terrible. The CGI was loud and confusing, and the fight scenes were choreographed beautifully, but never showed up on camera. A prime example of this is the SWAT scene in the middle of the movie. Someone had to choreograph a huge fight between a massive, CGI creature and an entire SWAT unit, but it barely showed up on camera after one of the officers initially used a smoke bomb to deter Venom. There might have been some merit to this moment had there not been such cliché flashes of Venom’s figure among the cloud of smoke thrashing these guys into oblivion. The audience understands what is going on in a basic sense, but this would have been the perfect opportunity to show the savagery of Venom’s power. Another example of this is the boss fight scene at the end of the movie. As I mentioned before, the fight was very hard to watch due to a fault in the way the CGI forms were rendered.
Warning! This one is a little bit gorey!
I appreciate what Fleischer was going for in trying to follow the classic design of a Symbiote’s fluid form, but on screen it could have been so much more interesting for the audience to watch without the excess of dynamic shots in this fight scene specifically.
Despite it’s visual faults, I genuinely liked Venom, even though my inner film major was screaming at me (why does Anne always seem to know exactly where Eddie is? Screenwriter omniscience, I suppose?). The dialogue was the movie’s saving grace- it was absolutely hilarious. Tom Hardy captured Eddie’s character in every way, and delivered dialogue in a hilariously innocent tone that made the dichotomy between Venom and Eddie as a whole so much more intense.
Hardy’s character also had a great amount of chemistry between his love interest Anne, played by Michelle Williams. Williams was also hugely hilarious in some of her one-liners and actually made movement within the plot, despite Venom’s insistence she stay out of it. The chemistry between these characters made us feel much more involved in the moral struggle underneath the humor. It’s hard to say that there isn’t a moral undertone given that the plot of the movie relies heavily on the ethical mistakes in a multimillionaire and his hope for humanity to save the Earth from their habitual destruction of its nature. However, there weren’t a lot of “superhero speech” moments that come with normal movies in the genre. These “superhero speeches” make the audience roll their eyes if they’re written with an “edginess” to them.
Maybe without the addition of Jared Leto’s on set transgressions, in Suicide Squad, this scene might have been a little scary, but in reality it’s just cringe. Venom plays off the cliché supervillain monologue in a hilarious way, which made the film all the more enticing to a general audience rather than a critic.
I loved the humanity of Venom’s character by the end. It was important to showcase the link between Eddie’s dry sense of humor and the Symbiote’s alien hopelessness in a dynamic way. I find it hard to genuinely laugh at comedy movies most of the time but I actually laughed out loud at some of the end scenes between Eddie and Venom. I can’t explain why they were so funny without going off on a tangent about how my dry sense of humor and fear of conflict made Eddie’s character instantaneously relatable, so I’ll leave it at an innate dynamic.
The dichotomy between the critics and the general audience on Venom is a severe representation of the danger of the definition of a “good” movie in film culture. In all, Fraischer received a high ranking on the list of directors I respect because they aren’t afraid to toe the line of a good movie and a fun movie.