Venom

Ruben Fleischer – 2018 – USA

Speaking as someone who has almost no interest in superheroes, I can’t say whether or not Venom is a great comic-book movie. It seems to suffer from the same problems as pretty much all of the others; i.e. a weary inability to stray very far from the beaten path shared by the majority of these risk-averse and obscenely expensive corporate products. There are only two things that make this one a little different and interesting, and luckily they’re the two most visible things about it, its headliners; the eccentric method performance in the lead role by Tom Hardy, and the truly curious anti-performance of Riz Ahmed as the villain of the piece. Channeling Brando better than most, Hardy offers another in his series of twitchy, mumbly, shuffling turns as a down-and-outer unconscious of his true strength; in this case an investigative journalist working on a story about San Francisco’s vanishing indigents, who may or may not be victims of experiments run by a sinister research company and its technology entrepreneur/CEO, a smarmy-charming Elon Musk-type played by Ahmed. I don’t know if Hardy’s quirks fit the material, but I like that he’s as great as he is and big enough to have gotten his way; (I imagine a platoon of befuddled studio executives sending notes to the director begging him to make Hardy act more like Chris Hemsworth). Now to Ahmed, who happens to be one of the finest actors working today, right up there with his co-star Hardy. Ahmed is absolutely talented enough to be a convincing villain, but he doesn’t do it here. Even while saying evil things, he remains so dignified, likable and (strange as it sounds) honorable that it’s impossible to hate or fear him the way you’re supposed to hate or fear supervillains; not charming in a rascally way like Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor, but more like the rare occasions when certain actors who seem to have natural halos over their heads, like Alec Guinness or Omar Sharif, played villains; something simply doesn’t gel. Even though Riz Ahmed is a great enough actor to play a villain, he might be too good of a person, or at least too bright. His virtue, for lack of a better word, can’t be hidden, at least not by a Hollywood popcorn movie. (He did play a much more nuanced brute in Trishna (2011) and frankly I didn't completely buy it then either.)