Venom

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Venom 

Sony Pictures stumbled badly when it attempted to reboot its Spider-Man franchise a scant five years after Sam Raimi’s original trilogy came to a close, replacing Toby Maguire’s Peter Parker with Andrew Garfield. It was only after the studio loaned their money-minting web-spinner to Disney for integration into the hugely successful Marvel Cinematic Universe that Spidey’s movie course was corrected. So while the Mouse House will continue to control ol’ Web-Head’s onscreen adventures, Sony’s bean-counters made the money-driven decision to produce a film of their own, focusing on a popular comic book character they still control: Venom, a sentient alien symbiote that affixes its amorphous, liquid-like form to a human host in order to survive. In the comics, the Symbiote initially bonded with Peter, serving as Spider-Man’s bizarre living costume before becoming his darkest nightmare. But Spider-Man neither appears, nor is mentioned, in director Ruben Fleischer’s overhauled origin story. The film stars wildly overqualified thespian Tom Hardy (Oscar nominee for The Revenant), who sounds drunk as he mumbles and slurs his way through the role of Eddie Brock, an investigative reporter and the Symbiote’s longest-serving host both in print and on screen. Longtime Venom fans might need a stiff drink of their own if they make it through this hot mess of a movie. (At Assembly RowBoston CommonFenway, Seaport, South Bay and in the suburbs.)


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