The struggle with Sony‘s licensed Marvel characters continues, as its latest addition to the spider collection got out in theaters to mixed reviews. Yet there was something about the depiction of the antihero that stood out despite the mess.

Before going further, I got to say, that VENOM is my favorite antihero in the spider-verse. He’s edgy, three-dimensional and most of all, plain AWESOME! I loved the portrayal by none other than the household name, TOM HARDY and the chemistry between Eddie Brock and the Symbiote, the teasing of one another, the synchro between the two (i.e the Mask COPY scene, … so epic!) and the cinematography, also the few easter eggs are there to appease our comic book thirst, … and to me, those were the only great things about it and it sucks to see a great potential going downhill.

CGI wise, it was meh, the CGI was distracting as it wasn’t blended properly with the cinematography, and heck, I’ve even found the black costume of Venom in Spiderman 3 better than this iteration, yes it had its gooey appearance in the latter to match its alien origin but at least merge it properly into the cinematography, because it looked distracting as hell, for instance, that pretransformation scene where we see Venom’s face superposed on Eddie’s, looked like it was done on Adobe After Effects by an amateur, c’mon! … Regarding the antagonist ,Carlton Drake, portrayed by Riz Ahmed, it wasn’t as compelling, resulting in a generic miscast bad guy with a twisted perspective on humans,  bla bla bla,  been there done that.

The problem with VENOM is that it’s a character bound by Spiderman’s existence, created after Spidey got rid of the symbiote in the famous church scene, but due to MARVEL finally obtaining back the long relinquished rights of the character, it is now kind of hard to craft a true faithful origin story to the eponymous antihero without mentioning Spidey leading to legal disputes.

I would have preferred that the creative minds of Marvel Studios deal with the movie, rather than Sony speeding up the process to create a VENOMVERSE. Tom Hardy’s performance clearly deserves a key role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, alongside the other superstars, by introducing him in the new MCU Spiderman franchise and evolving the character into a Marvel Studios directed VENOMVERSE, and we all know, that Kevin Feige can do it perfectly, however, the rights acquisition of Venom would probably mean a total reboot, which means that Hardy’s performance will probably stay tainted by Sony’s bad storytelling.

          Woody Harrison as Cletus Kasady in Venom (2018)

Now about the post credit scene, it showed Cletus Kasady portrayed by True Detective actor, Woody Harrelson, promising us CARNAGE when he gets out, which was a good teaser for us, it looked promising for a sequel idea, but the scene wasn’t well crafted enough to bring out goosebumps, I would have preferred it to be more faithful to the comics just for once, and show us a rather different ending, …. hold on, here’s an idea :

” After being saved by the symbiote, Eddie Brock falls into the water and is caught by the SWAT team and taken into custody as a suspect of the rampage, he meets Cletus Kasady in a prison cell, and have an unnerving, weird interaction, meanwhile the symbiote is revealed to have survived the rocket fire, and followed Eddie to help him escape from prison, but as they depart, the symbiote has accidentally left some of its remains, which found the closest host nearby; Cletus Kasady, as he is merging with the symbiote, he disturbingly promises Carnage to the audience. ”  roll credits.

Not bad hein ? anyway, let’s just hope for a proper handling of the franchise in the future, or hope for a proper MCU reboot with Tom Hardy still remaining as the disgraced reporter, finally clashing with Tom Holland‘s Spiderman.

So, did you like the movie ? What are your thoughts about Venom ? Tell me in the comments !