Fans are starting to get more than a little impatient waiting to see the first trailer for September’s sequel Let There Be Carnage, which might have played a significant part in Venom rocketing up the Netflix viewership rankings, where it’s currently the sixth most popular movie on the platform around the globe.
Tom Hardy’s debut as Eddie Brock surprised an awful lot of people when it hauled in over $850 million at the box office after being released in October 2018, especially since the critical response was hardly glowing. Venom‘s Rotten Tomatoes score is currently a meager 30%, but fans clearly enjoyed it a great deal more seeing as its audience rating is sitting at 81% from 25,000+ votes.
Ruben Fleischer’s direction is workmanlike almost to a fault, and there’s no real sense of style or flair to the visuals, but luckily he had one of the most dedicated and committed actors in the business playing the lead role. Indeed, Venom would have suffered greatly if it wasn’t for Hardy’s neurotic performance as Eddie Brock, with the actor free to imbue a one-note character on the page with various tics and idiosyncrasies that make him stand out among a raft of cookie cutter comic book heroes.
Venom is definitely less than the sum of its parts, though, with Riz Ahmed and Michelle Williams largely wasted in thankless roles, but there’s still a lot of fun to be had in the sheer gonzo insanity of it all. It’s like a superhero blockbuster straight out of the 1990s, which is meant as a minor compliment in this instance, focusing almost entirely on set pieces and bang for your buck, without concern for shared universes or sequels. At least until the post-credits scene, which we’re still waiting to see paid off after Let There Be Carnage was delayed repeatedly.
