VENOM

When a spaceship owned by Life Foundation's billionaire CEO Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed, 'Rogue One', playing a boring version of Elon Musk) crashes to Earth with alien symbiote samples, Brock is tasked with conducting a puff-piece interview on Drake to improve the PR of his company. Brock hacks into Anne's laptop, steals some sensitive information and confronts Drake, who has become obsessed with preparing humanity for Earth's inevitable ecological collapse, and begun illegally experimenting on vagrants. This leads to Brock and Anne being fired from their jobs and the end of their relationship. So when a whistleblower (Jenny Slate, 'Gifted') wants to expose Drake's deadly human/symbiote experiments, she calls a near-destitute Brock to finish the job. Instead of a hot story, he winds up with a sassy parasite "up his ass" that speaks inside Eddie's head in a low, devilish mumble even when his shark-toothed face stays hidden.

Guess what? 'Venom' has flaws. It opens with a shockingly perfunctory introduction to the symbiotes as they crash to Earth, where they immediately start possessing people. The film also has three credited scriptwriters, so the story feels like it's been put through the wringer a few times.

However, the majority of the film's weaknesses are the result of 'Venom' trying to adhere to the tiresome-but-lucrative Marvel model of tick-box filmmaking.

An origin story with a dull villain? Tick. Under-utilised female leads and a climax with a nearly incomprehensible battle between two computer-generated blobs? Tick. Even the film's mild rating is a concession by Sony that leaves the door open for the character to eventually crossover into a family-friendly 'Spider-Man' movie in the future.

What Sony forgets is that 'X-Men', Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan's 'Batman' movies, and Raimi's 'Spider-Man' series have all proved that non-MCU superhero movies can be good. When 'Venom' stops trying to mimic Marvel's studio-calculated formula for franchise-building, it becomes ridiculously fun.

There is action-aplenty. Brawls, a bone-breaking motorcycle chase and a lot of Jason Bourne-meets-Leigh Whannell's 'Upgrade' stuff as Brock is remote controlled by his parasite. When the new dual-life form morphs into something resembling a combination of a gorilla, a dinosaur and an outdoor toilet, everything kicks up a notch.

Tom Hardy, knowing how hammy you need to go in comic book films, journeys deep into Nicolas Cage "full werewolf" territory. The emotional range he draws upon is similar to Cage's performance in 'Mandy' and it's a lot funnier and more engaging than the bland performances by Paul Rudd in 'Ant-Man', Benedict Cumberbatch in 'Doctor Strange' and whatever Mark Ruffalo was attempting with Bruce Banner in 'Avengers: Infinity War'.

Brock's rapport with the jacked-up CG Venom, with its ludicrously outsized tongue and craving for eating people's heads, is amusing. In 'Spider-Man 3', the symbiote brought out Peter Parker's dark side and Eddie Brock was the kind of dark double that Alfred Hitchcock's films (such as his magnum opus, 'Vertigo') obsessed over. In 'Venom', the alien has a buddy-cop relationship with its host - like 'Lethal Weapon', the two have very different and conflicting personalities but are forced to work together to defeat criminals.

Hardy has compared the two characters to 'Ren and Stimpy', and given each a distinctive voice: a bizarro American accent for Brock; and a "James Brown lounge lizard"-like voice for Venom, modulated to sound more sinister. It's a hoot. Consider this exchange where Brock contemplates battling Riot, an even more powerful symbiote:

BROCK (squelchy New York accent): "Can you take this dude?"

VENOM (deep voice): "He's got shit like you ain't never even seen before."

BROCK: "Fuck it."

Aside from Brock and Venom's relationship, some of the best moments are scenes of superhero body horror that feel like teen-friendly takes on David Cronenberg's 'The Fly', the highlight being a dishevelled Hardy chomping the heads off live lobsters in a fancy restaurant. Recalling 'Shivers', a parallel sequence of another symbiote body-hopping its way from Malaysia to San Francisco (at one point possessing a cute pig-tailed child) is also rather creepy.

While 'Venom' has plenty of rough edges, I'd rather watch a scrappy film that was genuinely entertaining and different than another by-the-numbers instalment in a franchise whose edges have been sanded down into nothingness. Not every superhero production needs to be as carefully house-styled and tastefully manicured as the typical MCU entry. These films come out at a rate of two or three per year and, frankly, 'Ant-Man' and 'Doctor Strange' and even 'Black Panther' and 'Spider-Man: Homecoming' really blurred together.

When the film relaxes and stops sucking in its gut, 'Venom' is reminiscent of the post-Spider-Man, pre-MCU superhero pictures. It's more of a cross between John Carpenter's 'Big Trouble in Little China' and Guillermo del Toro's 'Blade 2' than a modern superhero film. If you think that sounds like fun, go and see it. You won't be disappointed.