Venom. All in All...Meh.

Full transparency here.  I've never been a huge fan of the Venom character.  The fact that it has become a comic book force of nature has always been baffling to me.  It's just so...silly looking.  The tongue, the oversized teeth, the ridiculously hinged jaw, all of it always looked like what you'd get if you asked a kindergarten class to group think a supervillain.  And somehow he's the most popular Spiderman villain, spawning his own solo comics and a whole family of Venom-ettes, equally as popular so I'm told.

I was mortified when it was announced that Venom would appear in Spiderman 3 and to date that's my least favourite Marvel based movie.  I'd rather rewatch Howard the Duck than that mess and I blame at least 50% of my hatred on the inclusion of the Venom character.  Obviously most of the remaining 50% is laid squarely at the feet of dancing, emo Peter Parker and anyone who thought that was a good idea.

When I found out Venom would be fronting his own film without benefit of a Spiderman tie in (for the non initiated, the symbiote originally bonded with Spiderman before bonding with Eddie Brock and becoming a villain) I was torn.  Since I prefer classic Spiderman villains to the symbiote-come-lately variety, the cleaving of the two is fine with me.  I still wasn't sold on the whole Venom solo film though.

After seeing it tonight, I'm still not.  In all honesty I was so unimpressed early on that thoughts of walking out danced in my head.  Venom's lucky I'm really, really lazy.  It did get better, just not as better as I would have liked.

On the good side, the effects were great.  The two big fight/chase scenes were pretty nifty (poor San Fransisco, two superhero battle chases in one summer - they did a great job of cleaning up after Ant-Man and Wasp earlier this year) and worked as well as any I've seen.  Also good was the tweaked origin, nicely getting rid of the need for Spiderman to set it up and even giving us a brief cameo of astronaut John Jameson, son of good old JJJ from the Daily Bugle to boot.  There was one other cool, disturbingly sexy moment but I won't spoil it for ya.

On the bad, it basically adds sentient alien goo to the plot of 2004's Halle Berry anti-hero masterpiece, Catwoman.  There's even a parallel to the only good scene in that stinker, where Berry first uses her new powers to shut down a loud neighbour.  The villain chews less scenery but otherwise is pretty much the equivalent of Sharon Stone's evil make-up mogul, just with genetic engineering and interstellar colonization as motive instead of the search for the perfect anti-aging cream.

Overall it wasn't nearly as bad as Spiderman 3 but certainly not my favourite Marvel effort.  Not even my favourite Marvel via Sony effort.  In fairness, it's at least a bit better than Howard the Duck.

At least one stinger right after the first part of the credits, and as great as many seem to think its reveal is, it was just another thing that I didn't like about the film.  I didn't stick around to see if there was another at the end.  Pretty sure that's a first for me.

C+ but obviously I'm in the minority.  It's making big bank.  I can only assume that's because the character is more appealing to the rest of the world than it is to me.  No question, there's a sequel in the wind.