Venom, a feature-length movie about a Spider-Man villain, which does not feature Spider-Man, is out October 3, and we'll soon find out if this massive gamble of a movie pays off.
Hardy's Eddie Brock lands in this situation thanks to the machinations of mad billionaire scientist Carlton Drake ("The Night Of's" Riz Ahmed), who, shades of Elon Musk, has been using his fortune to explore space.
At the center of Venom is not one but two antiheroes in one body: Eddie - the ego-driven, obsessive reporter driven to expose the powerful and corrupt - and Venom, the chilling alien symbiote with incredible superpowers who fuses with Eddie.
Director Ruben Fleischer described this malarkey as a "grittier, grounded" version of Eddie Brock. And I think everybody on the crew is just fully invested in how he's chosen to realize Eddie Brock.
Early alarm bells might have sounded when Hardy was interviewed by ComicsExplained and responded to a question about his favorite scene in the film by saying, "There are scenes that aren't in this movie. I'm the symbiote. Together we are Venom". "They just never made it in".
We can't be sure based on this scene alone just how the Carnage symbiote will come into play or how Kasady will bond with it.
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The 36-year-old wore an army green Stina Jacket by Fjällräven (£154) and knee-high Penelope Chilvers Long Tassel Boots (£475). The London-based school teaches children about the natural world, taking in thousands of students each year for visits.
Like many recent superhero movies that can't quite live up to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (to which this Venom is not connected), this one's a hit and miss. But the Venom filmmakers also realized that it would take a talented actor to straddle both the personalities of Venom and Eddie Brock. There are a few moments of incoherence that lead one to wonder what the supposed R-rated cut of this film looked like at one point, but what's here is mindless and frenetic, good enough for government work but not especially showy or inventive.
The Chicago Tribune also writes - with a certain disdain for the big Marvel and DC film-universe tentpoles - that a real mess of a movie is "so much more thrilling than any of the formulaic superhero movies that parade through multiplexes all year".
"It's easy to watch a film like this and wonder why the likes of Hardy and Ahmed - great actors in so many other things - are wasting their talent". Gleiberman likened Hardy's performance to an "impersonation of a benignly inarticulate stoner clown who's only got half his marbles", while McCarthy called the actor "disheveled, stubbly, sweaty, and bloated", suggesting that he'd be "the ideal actor to one day play Harvey Weinstein". The fact that Venom plays everything so safe and by-the-numbers truly hinders it-a frustrating result considering that Hardy is clearly trying to put his all into the character.
Hardy said Venom has similarities to several classic monster movies.
That's partly because in the comics, Venom was essentially Spider-Man's evil twin; Brock and the symbiote were joined together by their hatred of the webslinger, and their stories were nearly always intertwined with his.
