Sony had already handled the idea of dedicating a film to The Sinister Six, a group of villains who made life miserable for Spider-Man, but the wall-crawler reboot led the studio to scrap the idea. Finally, his first attempt to take advantage of the rich universe of this superhero beyond the adventures of the said superhero was ‘Venom’, a peculiar film that tonight you can (again) see on La 1 from 22:05.
Of course, do not expect to see a trace of Spider-Man here -the closest thing to this is a brief mention that the protagonist previously lived in New York-, since it is true that it is an expansion of it, but it gives the feeling that they wanted to keep it as far away as possible and then assess a possible crossover based on how things were going with ‘Venom’
Too Many Mistakes
It is still in the air that Tom Hardy’s Venom and Tom Holland’s Spider-Man will cross their paths at some point, but what is surprising is the phenomenal reception that this film had due to the large number of problems it exhibits. In fact, his greatest virtue is the great success of choosing Hardy for this role, since it is he who makes ‘Venom’ not completely collapse.
First, because he is the one who makes Eddie Brock not too unfriendly during the first minutes of the film and then because he manages to give us the funniest moments of the show in the relationship he establishes with Venom. It is true that in another ecosystem it could have been used more, but that is something that makes it much more bearable that everything that is around it fails to a greater or lesser extent.
From the fact of wasting a cast with interpreters of proven talent such as Riz Ahmed or Michelle Williams, who can do little with the material at hand, but even more important is the wrong choice of Ruben Fleischer to take care of finding the ideal tone so that the movie works better.
In fact, ‘Venom’ ends up being somewhat chaotic partly because of the script, but mostly because of its indecision. On the one hand, it seems to want to be focused on a more adult audience but it remains half-baked, and then it manages the emotions that the characters are going through very poorly, often oscillating between the ridiculous and the confusing, although being fair also get some moment with quite a visual outside. Of course, without any continuity, since no scene is really memorable.
Luckily, for the second installment, it was decided to change the director -from Fleischer, we went to Andy Serkis-, while in the script only Kelly Marcel remains. Let’s see if with fewer people reaching out, something worthwhile can come out, that post-credits scene – be careful with the spoiler if you haven’t seen it yet – did leave you with a lot of curiosity to see Venom facing Matanza, played for the occasion by Woody Harrelson.
I am convinced that even Sony did not trust that ‘Venom’ was going to become the box office bomb that it ended up being, and it is that with it they made a somewhat conservative bet by granting a budget of 100 million dollars, and then it ended entering 856 million in its passage through theaters.
