Like a turd in the wind.

There was a time, if you dare to remember, when superhero movies weren’t the box office darlings they are today. In fact, they were a bit of a laughing stock. Kids…ask your parents.

The late nineties and early noughties were a formative time for the superhero genre and it showed, as studios grabbed desperately and blindly at comic book characters like kids fumbling around in an unfamiliar toy box. They had good stuff on their hands, they just didn’t know how to play with it.

At its worst, you had studios knocking out guff like Catwoman and Daredevil that showcased a shocking lack of respect for both their audience and the characters themselves, while offering basic, fundamentally flawed plots that were often downright lazy. But, while superhero films have certainly come a long way in their presentation and execution, there remain those studios out there stubbornly determined to continue partying like 1999 never ended.

A prime suspect in this, Sony have a lot to answer for in their continuous mismanagement and misunderstanding of the iconic characters at their disposal. And then, as if to hammer home the point, along comes Venom; emerging from the shadows a good decade too late, into a superhero world that’s moved on in its absence.

Jobless and humiliated following a botched expose on shady Life Foundation CEO Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), investigative journalist Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) attempts a big comeback but inadvertently find himself the host of an alien symbiote, bestowing him with a vicious alter-ego named Venom. With an insatiable appetite and a thirst for violence, Eddie must learn to work in harmony with Venom to harness his newfound powers and protect the world from Drake and his nefarious symbiote plans before it’s too late.

If ever there were a prime example of Hollywood not needing to make everything with the merest hint of comic book about it just because they can, it’s Venom - a superhero movie that felt way passed its use-by date before cameras even started rolling.

Even those with a rudimentary understanding of comic book lore will know who Venom is and just how inherently connected he is with Spider-Man. Their relationship is truly symbiotic in every sense of the word, from Venom’s very origins to his burning hatred for the hero; fuelled by Eddie Brock’s own fixation and jealousy. In short – there really is no Venom without Spider-Man.

With Peter Parker now tied up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Sony have ploughed on regardless, in a rather bull-headed attempt to milk a franchise without its MVP, instead focusing on Venom and turning him into something he’s never really been – a full-blown superhero.

It just feels a bit wrong and speaks to the wider problems in Sony’s approach to a universe that they all-but killed with The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and a character in Venom that they shat the bed on in Spider-Man 3. On Sony’s part, there’s a clear fundamental misunderstanding of their assets, and while Spider-Man (for now, at least) is in the safe hands of Kevin Feige at Marvel Studios, the same can’t be said for his long term foe.

From the bog-standard origin plot to the Eminem tie-in track, Venom feels like a superhero film outside its time; a throwback to the early millennium and an era where comic book movies were still learning the ropes. While there’s certainly fun to be had in a superhero story going back to basics and largely detached from a wider cinematic universe, Venom feels so undeveloped in its approach that it struggles to justify its place in the genre’s increasingly crowded landscape.

Venom is an origin story with no real origin to speak of. It’s a film written and edited by comity to fit an audience demographic that doesn’t really exist and, as a consequence, feels devoid of both purpose or personality. Like much of the CGI on display, Venom is a mess. A silly and occasionally enjoyable mess, but a mess nonetheless.

Starting with a plot so scrappy and uninspiring that it feels like director Ruben Fleischer was reduced to shooting off a first draft script, Venom makes no effort to stay coherent or offer anything fresh to a comic book audience whose palette has grown in sophistication over time. This is by-the-numbers superhero storytelling on a level that would’ve looked shaky back in 2002.

From the get-go, the film’s narrative feels off, hindered as it is by incoherent editing and great chunks of the plot seemingly AWOL. Treating us to an utterly tedious opening 45-minutes of overcooked exposition and undercooked characters, Venom takes an absolute ago to get going, as Eddie Brock wanders around, rambling and taking notes without so much as a sniff of the symbiote. 

With fingerprints all over it from a studio that have no real idea what they want Venom to be, the awkwardly lurching editing and hasty narrative expose a film devoid of imagination and identity. Sony’s clear desperation to squeeze Venom into a PG-13 (a 15 in the UK) mould produces a neutered film that forgoes the character’s inherent horror leanings and finds itself caught in a no man’s land somewhere between Deadpool and Spider-Man: Homecoming. 

What begins with a promising Alien­­-light sci-fi/horror tone, as bodies drop in the symbiote’s bloodthirsty attempt to find a host, ends up as an awkward mashup of Swamp Thing and Flubber. Promising horror and delivering something far more light-hearted is fine if the transition feels earned, yet Venom fails to convince with a script that, while it has its moments as the Brock-Venom comedy double-act kicks in, is regularly found wanting. 

Dogged by nonsensical dialogue throughout, Venom’s writing is truly terrible, as characters are reduced to nothing but a string of awkward, cringe-worthy lines that suit neither the film’s intended tone nor the actors delivering them. The script feels like it was all cobbled together at the last minute, and with plot holes wider than Venom’s grin popping up all over the shop, it’s just a bit embarrassing for all involved.

I’m not sure many in Venom’s intended audience will be all that hung up on lacklustre dialogue and an undeveloped plot, therefore such things would be salvageable if the film’s action popped, yet while it sporadically hints at great things, there’s just not enough there to paper over the cracks. 

Serviceable though it may be, the film’s action hinges largely on the black, malleable blob that is Venom and, as a consequence, involves a lot of barely comprehensible, floaty CGI that does little to engage or excite, even as Tom Hardy puts his all into it physically. Although there’s a certain amount of charm in seeing black tentacles protrude from Hardy at random, it all feels rather goofy and off-kilter for Venom as a character.

In full, toothy form, Venom himself looks fantastic and as close as we’ve ever come to the comic version up on the big screen; yet, in action, the design gets lost in a blur of computer generated symbiote goo. As with any CGI-heavy film, there’s always a risk that the action loses its impact and that’s certainly the case here, as Venom’s major set pieces rapidly descent into a weightless, barely coherent blur of no real consequence.

Saving the entire film from the superhero bargain bin is (unsurprisingly) Tom Hardy himself, who in his dual role as both Venom and Eddie Brock, provides a pleasantly surprising level of entertainment. In what amounts to a one-man comedy double-act, Hardy is having an absolute blast in a role he’s clearly happy to avoid taking seriously. 

Funnier than it has any right to be, the back and forth between Venom and Brock goes from slapstick humour to old married couple bickering, occasionally offering light relief from the rest of the film’s failings. It’s just a shame we had to wait so damn long for the two to find one another, as the Eddie Brock of the opening act possesses about as much personality and likeability as the featureless symbiote gunk we see slithering around the Life Foundation labs. 

For a man often found scowling and mumbling his way through films, the sight of Tom Hardy actually having fun in a role is as joyous as it is rare, yet he regularly finds himself hamstrung by the material at his disposal, as does everyone else.

Similarly suffering at the hands of lazy writing and wafer-thin characterisation, Riz Ahmed and Michelle Williams are left high and dry by the script; with Ahmed’s Carlton Drake coming off as nothing more than the kind of uninspiring corporate villain that went out of fashion years ago, while Williams is shockingly underused in a lacklustre love interest role that she’s clearly sleepwalking through. Together with Jenny Slate’s utterly pointless scientist and Woody Harrelson’s rather awkward cameo, Venom criminally underutilises its talented cast, as Ruben Fleischer struggles to furnish anyone outside of Hardy any material of significance.

Saying that…the film contains one of the best Stan Lee cameos to date, which is nice.

Even Fleischer himself has been dealt a bum hand by Sony, as the promise the director once showed in the fantastic Zombieland has been left to rot by producers Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach, whose consistent fumbling of Spider-Man and his periphery characters has been so poor for such a long time now, you wonder how they keep getting asked back.

Aimlessly trundling along like a particularly messy turd in the wind, Venom is a movie without direction or purpose, and severely lacking in the kind of class or nuance that has been the driving force behind the superhero genre’s recent rise to prominence. To his credit, Tom Hardy gives it everything in a dual role that injects a bit of personality and life into the proceedings precisely when the film needed it most. However, despite the star’s commitment, there’s nothing he can do to resuscitate a script that feels like it crash-landed from 2002. Sony’s insistence on ploughing ahead with an origin story for a character that feels lost without Spider-Man’s involvement just feels pig-headed; ripping Venom of his primary USP and devouring any hope that the studio has what it takes to pull off their pocket Spider-verse with any real success.