I do have to agree with reviewers who said it felt like a generic 90s superhero movie. It's very rote, predictable and by the numbers in a way that reminded me of Daredevil, The Amazing Spider-Man movies and the Tim Story Fantastic Four.
Wrong decade. A generic 1990s superhero movie would be a garish POS like
Steel or
The Phantom. Venom is much slicker than that. But it is very 2000s. The one it reminds me of the most is
Ghost Rider-- quirky, decent-but-flawed hero possessed by something darker; mindless CGI battle ensues. It lacks the genuine sense of a unique identity that we've gotten used to from most of the Marvel Studios movies.
That said, I thought it was OK. I'm not in any rush to see it again but I probably will because I have friends who haven't seen it yet. I don't think much of the character or the action scenes or the FX. But I really enjoyed Tom Hardy's performance. He brings a real character performance to a role that could have been a very straight, boring leading-man. I can't say I recommend it but you could do worse.
I'll certainly take it over the insufferable wink-wink-nudge-nudge of
Deadpool.
I suspect the reason why it's doing so well is because they had the good sense to release it in October, after all of the big summer blockbusters are already gone and we've had a chance to miss them. It's had no genuine competition. A month or 2 later, it would have been crushed by the absolute clusterf--k that we're building up to at the end of this year.
There's no reason you can't portray brutality in a PG-13 movie. You just have to leave some of the visual details to the imagination, which Alfred Hitchcock would tell you is actually more effective than showing it outright.
Yeah, ratings for action movies are pretty subjective. Compare the PG-13 rated theatrical cut of
Daredevil with the R rated Director's Cut. All of the goriest moments are still in the PG-13 version. The Director's Cut just has longer action scenes and a more morose tone, which makes it feel darker. But it's still a very dark movie and absolutely should not be attended by the same 4-year-old kids whose parents took them to see a PG-13 rated
Spider-Man movie.
I don't think that the R rated version of
Venom would be substantially different. Venom already kills people and bites their heads off. We just don't see the kind of blood that we would plausibly be seeing from that IRL. I suspect that an R rated
Venom would feel about as different as the R rated version of
The Wolverine.
infects Eddie. I loved Venom's inner monologue. I wasn't expecting much from it, and really thought about not seeing it when it turned out to be PG-13, but I'm glad I saw it!
