(Photo Credit: Sony Pictures)

A few days ago, the first bits of “footage”(if you could call it that) from the Todd Phillips-directed, Joaquin Phoenix-starring Joker movie were shared on Twitter. It was the first bit of proof that what feels like a terrible idea — a solo Joker movie that’ll be released into a world that will also be getting a Joker and Harley Quinn movie starring Jared Leto and Margot Robbie in the not too distant future — was actually coming to fruition. Before I saw that seconds long teaser, it was very easy for to me cover my ears and eyes and pretend like this thing that could only exist in 2018, in the midst of what feels like a near-permanent boom in comic book films, was something that was bound to languish in development hell like a million other bad ideas. But you know what? That little bit of footage of Phoenix looking weird as hell convinced me that a good solo Joker movie could be made. The Joker is a Batman villain, sure but his fungible origin — basically, a failed comedian tries to rob a chemical plant but gets pushed into a toxic vat by Batman, permanently changing his hair, skin, and lip color and making him go insane — could make for a compelling script. I know Martin Scorsese isn’t attached to the project anymore, but it’s not hard to see The Joker as the main character in a Taxi Driver or The King of Comedy-style movie where we follow his descent into madness and the unspeakable acts he commits along the way. For all of his over saturation, The Joker can still be a compelling character in the right hands, even when he isn’t acting as Batman’s foil.

Unfortunately, The same cannot be said about Venom. Venom exists solely to ruin the life of his foe, Spider-Man. That’s because one half of Venom, the goopy black alien parasite known as the symbiote who first glommed onto Your Friendly Neighborhood Webslinger on Battleworld (don’t ask), was spurned by Peter Parker when he realized it was turning him into kind of an aggro dick. The other half of Venom is Eddie Brock, a journalist whose career is ruined when Spider-Man catches a bad guy that Brock had supposedly identified in a high profile expose (don’t ask), and ends up getting addicted to weightlifting and swears his revenge. Eventually, Brock and the symbiote linkup to become a being of pure vengeance that exists for no other reason than to destroy Spider-Man. One could argue that this makes the character empty, but I think it helps make him terrifying. After all, what’s more terrifying than you, a decent and upstanding person, making a mortal enemy, and knowing that their every waking moment is devoted to tearing you to pieces?

Whether or not you think Venom is an interesting character or just kinda cool looking, I hope my lengthy intro convinced that you Venom, the Tom Hardy-starring superhero film that kinda-sorta-but-might-not-really be a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was not a good idea. In fact, I can confirm that it was a spectacularly bad idea. But I can’t say that this spectacularly bad idea didn’t also result in a pretty fun movie.

The Venom of this ill-defined Sony/MCU joint venture has a much different origin than his comic book counterpart. Here, the symbiote arrives on Earth when Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed, whose performance as a wide-eyed, narcissistic Silicon Valley CEO is brilliant in its absurdity), commissions a space mission to find planets for humans to colonize (and, it’s implied, buy up all the real estate before someone else can).

One of the symbiotes gets loose, crashes the space shuttle, and Drake and his weird private army of scientists and Secret Service rejects salvage the non-escaped specimens. Meanwhile, muckraking journalist Eddie Brock (Hardy) gets fired from his job when he asks Drake about deadly human experiments he’s been performing on homeless people, a faux pas that also costs him his fiancee (she’s a lawyer for Drake’s company who’s unprotected e-mail gave Brock intel on a dead hobo related lawsuit, you see), and all of that happens before the movie jumps six months in the future and gets to the meat of the story.

Does that all sound weird and contrived? That’s probably because it is! And I haven’t even explained how the movie ALSO follows the trip of the escaped symbiote from the crash site all the way back to San Francisco so it can merge with Drake to make a convenient villain. There’s a lot going on.

The most apparent problem with this movie is that it has no idea what it wants to be. When it follows the escaped symbiote (who we later learn is named “Riot.” It’s so weird that these alien beings with no apparent language give themselves English names that’d also work great for black metal or punk bands), it feels like it wants to be The Thing. When we follow Drake, it feels like it wants to be some straight-from-the-headlines allegory about Elon Musk and tech billionaires’ God-complexes. When we follow Brock — who ends up merging with the titular goo — it feels like it wants to be a comic re-working of The Fly, and later the blockbuster-friendly version of Upgrade. This tonal schizophrenia only serves to reinforce Venom’s pointlessness — we already have Alien, The Hulk, and Spider-Man. We don’t need the mashed up, dime store versions of any of those things when we already have the originals.

As is the case with many comic book adaptations, it’s impossible not to measure what you see on the screen against the expectations you come to the theater with. If you were intrigued by the internal dialogue the symbiote conduct within its host, the growly voice over that throws around flat Ant-Man-style jokes will disappoint you. If you were looking for body horror in the vein of John Carpenter or David Cronenberg, you’ll be sated with how the symbiote stuff pushes the creep-factor of a PG-13 movie, but ultimately disappointed that this movie is just rated PG-13.  And if you were expecting an interesting take on Venom as an anti-hero…well, you won’t really get that because, even when though the character insists he bites people’s heads off, the action is so blurry and quick cut that you can’t really tell if he actually does bite someone’s head off. Plus, his “anti-heroness” is undercut by the very overt attempts at humor (which is to say, he’s never really that menacing). Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle, he is not.

Even if you were just looking for a good old-fashioned superhero dust-up, there’s nothing remarkable about the action in this movie, with the climactic fight just another in a long line of CGI-heavy boxing matches that fails to excite. I could spend the rest of this review parsing what weird choices work and don’t work, but all you really need to know is that, for the most part, they don’t work, and pretty much any positive expectation you have coming in is likely to lead to disappointment.

I don’t want to be too mean because I did have some fun watching this movie, and Venom has had a pretty fraught post-production. Tom Hardy himself admitted that his favorite scenes were cut out of the movie, and the general theory seems to be that director Ruben Fleischer was shooting for an R rating before being told by the studio that the film had to be PG-13. Usually, excessive studio meddling of that sort results in a pretty bland product — think Justice League or Suicide Squad — but that’s not the case here. It’s fascinating to watch the series of bad ideas that made Venom possible collide with each other and break apart and actually make the movie entertaining in its own magnificently stupid way.

It’s astonishing to see how bad Sony misread the market here. On one level, such tone deafness shouldn’t be surprising. Sony is, after all, the same studio that thought Spider-Man should run Tough Mudders and listen to EDM to be more relevant to the youths. Still, it’s astounding that someone thought it’d be a good use of resources to get Eminem to record a terrible title song for this movie. It’s almost like they were trying to make a faux-edgy, self-parodying trainwreck that would transport audiences back to the cultural zeitgeist of 2003. Like I said, it’s a fun watch, but I can’t necessarily tell if we’re laughing with Sony or at them.

It’s hard to not play the “what if” game whenever a major studio releases a botched adaptation of a well-known IP. After all, if Fleischer and Sony had played their cards right, there’s a chance they could’ve ended up with a chilling story about an anti-hero who has to struggle to restrain his bloodthirsty other half. But, even if they did end up with something that felt a little more Dark Knight than Green Lantern, Venom would still have been a movie about a bunch of space goop with fangs, and that unavoidable fact highlights a truth about comic book adaptations that’s becoming rapidly apparent: as studios reach deeper and deeper into the superhero cannon, they’ll find characters that are harder to fit into either the dark, realistic mold of Christopher Nolan or the hyper-earnestness of the MCU. Some characters work a little better as Adam West than Christian Bale, which is to say, superhero movies might end up getting a little more self-consciously “fun” than they have been in recent memory. It already happened with Deadpool, looks like it’s going to happen with Shazam, and Marvel slouched in that general direction with Ant-Man and The Wasp. Heck, Sony’s next superhero release, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (a preview of which acted as one of Venom’s post-credits scenes), seems, above all else, like a fairly light-hearted, brightly colored romp. So, maybe, that’s one of the few things Venom gets right. Not every superhero movie has to be an allegory for civil rights or the creeping surveillance state. Sometimes they’re just supposed to be big, dumb fun.