This fall, the long-awaited Marvel spinoff film “Venom” hit theaters. Although the movie dominated the box office, it still received mixed reviews from critics and fans alike. Normally spinoff films are successful (Deadpool, Annabelle, and Creed), but there was something about Venom that just didn’t click. Tom Hardy did a superior job with the mediocre material he was given, but his performance was the only good thing about this film.

Eddie Brock is a well known investigative journalist. Brock is dedicated to exposing what goes on behind the scenes when it comes to corrupt corporate companies. Eddie was in a happy and healthy relationship with his fiancee Anne Weying until it falls apart. One day he is assigned to do a piece on the founder of The Life Foundation, Dr. Carlton Drake. Dr. Drake is a crazy billionaire, obsessed with messing with aliens and humans. Anne works for a law firm that represents Dr.Drake, so she has all the dirt on him. Since Eddie has the tendency to go above and beyond, he ends up going into Anne’s computer to find implicating evidence. It’s 2018 and Anne doesn’t have a password on her laptop… I found that interesting. Brock approaches Dr. Drake with the evidence and both Eddie and Anne lose their jobs. The engagement is called off and Eddie hits rock bottom. He is desperately looking for jobs, and all of a sudden Dr. Dora Skirth meets with Eddie, saying Dr. Drake is injecting aliens into humans. The aliens are called “symbiotes.” The alien life forms are in a liquid form and need a host to bond with (normally a human) in order to survive.  She isn’t comfortable with the situation and wants Eddie to expose him and investigate. Then that’s where Eddie is introduced to the alien named Venom. The murdering machine gets into Eddie’s head and takes over his body. The voice of Venom was actually Tom Hardy, which I thought was cool. With the help of movie magic they turned his voice into a creepy sounding alien. Tom Hardy did a phenomenal job in my opinion.

Venom is a villain from the Spiderman franchise. Originally the movie was supposed to be rated R since the comics are very dark and heads are being chomped off left and right. Instead, it was changed to PG-13, to appeal to a larger audience, which means no gory murder scenes. It seemed like some scenes were about to embrace the scarier aspect of Venom, but then the movie doesn’t follow through and shies away from it. There’s a lot of talk about crazy violence but no actual gore. Most of the movie is just Brock and Venom arguing about eating people. It’s filled with corny comedy; it was basically a Deadpool wannabe. The film was also too long at two hours and twenty minutes. It could have gone without a five-minute long car chase. And could have cut down the dialogue between Eddie and Venom. It was a little much.

Overall this movie was way over-hyped. It had potential, but sadly Marvel dropped the ball. Don’t waste your money seeing this in theaters, just wait until you can stream it.