‘Venom’ Movie Review Roundup: Critics Call It A Mess

In Marvel’s Venom, a journalist by the name Eddie Brock puts forth his best effort into taking down Carlton Drake, the notorious founder of the Life Foundation. While investigating one of Drake’s experiments, things take a huge turn as Brock’s body suddenly merges with the alien Venom. Brock then becomes superhuman and gains strength and power, but Venom fueled by rage tries to control Eddie’s new dangerous abilities. 

The movie will be released on October 5, and critical ratings haven’t been kind. Rotten Tomatoes has given the movie a 30 percent. The Venom screenplay was written by Kelly Marcel, Jeff Pinkner, and Scott Rosenberg, and it was directed by Ruben Fleischer.  

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“The action? It’s repetitive enough to bore you breathless. And the special effects are strictly bottom shelf. Social media has been all over Venom, accusing fans of stuffing the Web with fake bad reviews so A Star Is Born won’t whack it at the box-office. Don’t sweat it. No one has to fake a bad review of this. The ending suggests there’s a Eddie/Venom buddy sequel in the offing. Someone needs to bite the head off that idea pronto. Audiences have suffered enough.”

– Peter Travers, The Rolling Stone

“Venom isn’t quite bad, but it’s not exactly good either. It’s noncommittally mediocre and, as a result, forgettable. It just sort of sits there, beating you numb, unsure of whether it wants to be a comic-book movie or put the whole idea of comic-book movies in its crosshairs.”

– Chris Nashawaty, Entertainment Weekly

“Venom never fully embraces or maximizes the exuberant nastiness of its premise. This is one instance in which a story that should have been unsparingly dark feels hobbled, even sanitized, by its PG-13 rating, and also by the usual Hollywood franchise imperatives. In time, of course, Eddie and Venom will eventually become a functional buddy-comedy duo, with Eddie partaking of Venom’s extraordinary abilities while bringing those pesky deadly impulses under submission.”

– Justin Chang, LA Times

“By the end, the character, in his Vader-with-attitude way, growls out a few vaguely amusing pissed-off things. (You realize that he’s a new breed of snark beast around the time he drops a certain word starting with “p.”) But it’s telling that the TV commercials for ‘Venom’ all feature this creature fully formed. Because it’s so long into the movie before Venom comes completely alive as a character that the commercials amount to a kind of spoiler. And it’s not hard to see why they’re designed that way. Venom could have been a fun creation, but the film spends too long watching him…originate. The movie ‘Venom’ actually wants to be is the sequel.”

– Owen Gleiberman, Variety 

Watch the trailer below,