“Venom” is exactly the sort of fun, forgettable movie Hollywood is in love with these days. It came out without a tremendous amount of hype, aside from diehard comic book fanboys, and proceeded to make a boatload of money.
I just saw it two months ago and I can barely remember it.
Tom Hardy plays Eddie Brock, a hard-charging digital journalist living the dream in San Francisco. Things come crashing down in short order when he takes on a technology tycoon (Riz Ahmed) everyone thinks is nice but secretly is working on some nasty experiments. While busting into the laboratory to prove his case, Eddie gets unwillingly attached to an alien symbiote and becomes Venom.
It’s a symbiotic relationship -- if your partner was a bullying, violent ball of black tar from another planet that wants to bite off everyone’s heads. Eddie’s aware of everything going on when Venom takes over, but can’t really control it.
Powers are fairly similar to Spider-Man’s: super-strength and speed, as well as the ability to create spikes and other shapes out of its pitch-black form. Oh, and he’s got a nasty pair of choppers to make good on all the avowed head-chomping.
The action scenes are a bit muddy, and I didn’t appreciate another Tom Hardy character whose dialogue is hard to understand. He’s a great actor, but mumbling is not an aesthetic.
The Blu-ray comes with some cool bonus features, including several deleted and extended scenes, a making-of documentary, pre-visualization of some of the CGI-heavy sequences, several featurettes and a couple of music videos.
By far the coolest extra is “Venom Mode,” in which you can watch the movie with informative pop-ups throughout the movie that include comparisons with the comics and hidden references.
You might be tempted at first to think "The Sisters Brothers" is a Western comedy. It stars John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix as a pair of gunslinger siblings operating out of the Pacific Northwest circa 1851. One's a drunk, the other's a wet rag, and the trailer makes it look like they get into all sorts of hijinks while frequently tussling verbally and occasionally physically.
But this is a serious-as-salt production from French director Jacques Audiard, who has made some excellent pictures including "Rust and Bone" and the little-seen but marvelous "Dheepan." He adapted the screenplay along with Thomas Bidegain from Patrick deWitt's novel of the same name.
It's part anti-Western, part existentialist rumination on manhood, along with a decent amount of shoot-em-up thrown in. The movie feels like a bunch of eclectic pieces that work well together, for awhile.
Charlie Sisters (Phoenix) is the hard-bitten one of the pair, a born killer who has no thoughts beyond earning his next bounty and spending it on drink and whores. Eli (Reilly) is the older, wiser one. He's not soft; he doesn't hesitate to put a bullet in a man's head when he's down. But he does these things because it is Charlie's way, and so it must be his as well.
He is his brother's keeper, which he regards as both duty and prison.
They work for a man called the Commodore (Rutger Hauer, only glimpsed) who sends them off on various assassination missions. They all involve revenge for stealing something from the Commodore. Eli ponders aloud why the Commodore is robbed so frequently. Charlie doesn't really care.
Their latest job involves Hermann Warm (Riz Ahmed), a chemist who has come up with a formula that he thinks will make it easier to pan gold from the water in California. Jake Gyllenhall plays John Morris, a detective assigned to locate Warm and track him until the Sisters Brothers can arrive.
Morris is a curious figure. He doesn't seem prone to violence, has the refined manners of a rich man's son and mostly watches his quarry from a distance while writing his thoughts into a journal he's keeping. Unlike the Sisters, we get the sense manhunting is simply a phase he's passing through on the way to other adventures.
I won't give the plot away, other than the first two-thirds of the story involves following these two men in their parallel journeys, one pair tracking the other on their way down the coast to San Francisco.
Phoenix has been giving one terrific, offbeat performance after another lately, but here he plays a more or less straight character, a prototypical Western anti-hero. He's very deliberate about not thinking too hard about anything. Eli, on the other hand, is a cauldron of swirling thoughts and regrets. He carries a red shawl from a lady friend like a totem, a reminder of their fading youth and foul choices.
It's probably one of Reilly's best performances. Unfortunately, the movie loses steam during its last half-hour or so. The story reaches a natural end point, and then it keeps wandering away on the prairie, like a cowpoke with nowhere to go and in no hurry to get there.
"Venom" is pretty goofy and kind of a garbage movie. But it's the sort of thing that's fitfully entertaining, enough so that you tend to forgive the goofiness and garbageness.
Tom Hardy graduates from playing a Batman villain to a Marvel one, although in this telling he falls more into the anti-hero groove. You may remember from "Spider-Man 3" -- unless you've purged the entire thing from memory, which isn't a bad idea -- that Eddie Brock was a rival to Peter Parker's at the Daily Bugle who eventually become infected with the same alien symbiote that lent him his cool new black suit and darker powers.
This presumably takes place in some alternate timeline, where Eddie never became Venom but instead was chased out of the New York media scene for veiled indiscretions. He landed in San Francisco and has done well for himself, operating as a mobile investigative reporter for a local network doing "The Eddie Brock Report." He's got a cool townhouse, a nifty motorcycle and even niftier fiancee (Michelle Williams).
Things come a-tumblin' down when he goes after an Elon Musk-like tech billionaire whose space program brought back the alien creatures, which resemble twitching balls of tarry goo, and is experimenting with bonding them to mammal hosts, soon upgraded to human guinea pigs.
Eddie loses his job, his home, his girl and his reputation. Oddly, although his clothes and hair get scragglier, he never seems to run short on cash, generously handing a $20 bill to a homeless woman. And he's able to keep his bike and park it in a dingy alley without ever having to worry about it being stolen.
The villain is played by Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed, and I thought it was cool that we're at a place culturally and cinematically where we're comfortable with a brown bad guy. Though for some reason the movie grants him the overpoweringly WASP-y name of Carlton Drake.
One of the alien symbiotes attaches itself to Eddie, turning him into a monstrous figure that resembles Spider-Man dipped in boiling pitch, with a nasty sexualized tongue constantly wagging. He gains superhuman strength and agility, and the symbiote can create spikes or other shapes with its tentacle-like appendages.
Hilariously, the creature also speaks to him, using the same rough, growly Batman voice that has become de rigueur for darker comics characters. It can control Eddie's body and actions, though he remains conscious the entire time, even when Venom wants to (and does) chomp on people.
At one point Venom looks at a gang of mercenaries they have just defeated, and suggests he bite off their heads and arrange the pieces, just for the aesthetic pleasure of it. "Pile of bodies, pile of heads!" it demands.
There are some decent action scenes, though the CGI often becomes bewildering and hard to follow. Hardy plays Eddie as another one of his mush-mouth twerp characters, more Ratso Rizzo than Peter Parker.
"Venom" starts out a little scary and eventually turns into a weird buddy cop comedy, except one of them's a voracious alien creature and neither one of them is a cop.
Befitting its title and main character, “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” is the grittier, edgier entry in the Star Wars saga. Right from the get-go, director Gareth Edwards and screenwriters Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy give us the tonal and sensory cues that we’re in for something very different.
No ubiquitous text scrawl at the start of the movie. No blast of John Williams’ iconic Star Wars theme to set the mood. Indeed, Michael Giacchino’s score has a dark and forbidding beauty to it. The rebels are shown to be capable of underhanded dealings and even cold-bloodedness in battling the Empire. Hardly a lightsaber in sight.
There’s still a line between good and evil, but lots of graying at the fringes.
There are also plenty of hallmarks of Star Wars. It’s a tale of orphans and adoptive parents, of hope shoving off despair, of those who desire power for its own sake and those who would oppose them. The Force certainly plays less of a direct role than any of the seven other movies, but its energy still thrums in the background, living on the characters’ tongues and in their hearts.
It’s easy to call it the weakest of the Star Wars movies. The first half especially is discombobulated, with too many fringe characters demanding their moment in the spotlight. Including not one, not two but three Asian-influenced warriors who aid the cause. One of them is even the embodiment of that tired old saw, the blind-but-still-a-badass combatant.
Still, it’s a matter of degrees. The weakest Star Wars flick is better than 90% of sci-fi/fantasy films out there. And “Rogue One” continually builds energy as it goes instead of losing it, leading to an action-packed final act I suspect will leave zero fans disappointed.
You probably already know that “Rogue One” shines a light on the events leading up to the destruction of the (first) Death Star, depicting the men and women (and aliens) who procured the secret plans that made it possible for Luke Skywalker to blow up the planet-killing station.
(And, in doing so, it definitely rejiggers around some of the established Star Wars lore. To wit: Apparently, many Bothans didn’t die to bring us this information.)
Felicity Jones plays Jyn Erso, capable thief and miscreant. Abandoned as a child after her father (Mads Mikkelsen) was conscripted by the Empire to help construct the Death Star, she finds herself falling into the hands of the Rebel Alliance. Leader Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) recruits her to seek out Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), a radical who rescued Jyn as a child. Saw’s a battle-scarred sort who’s missing parts of his body, and we suspect that’s not all.
Chief baddie is Ben Mendelsohn as Director Orson Krennic, chief architect of the Death Star project, while Diego Luna provides the counterpoint, rebel spy chief Cassian Andor. Donnie Yen plays Chirrut Imwe, aforementioned blind guy, and Wen Jiang is stoic gunslinger Baze Malbus. Riz Ahmed plays Imperial pilot/turncoat Bodhi Rook, whose entire role could’ve been outsourced to a gaggle of stunt men and extras, and probably should have been.
The scene-stealer is droid K-2SO (voice and motion capture by Alan Tudyk), an Imperial enforcer who was captured and reprogrammed by Andor. He’s rather peevish but also protective of his human charges, and is so used to more freewheeling behavior that when the time comes to impersonate his former role, he’s spectacularly awful at it.
I enjoyed “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” – but then I’ve liked all the Star Wars movies, even the unfairly maligned prequels. (To those who harp on their clunky dialogue and goofy humor: that’s a feature, not a bug, of all these films.)
It’s a departure, but also a return to roots for a franchise that seemingly has whole new universes yet to explore.
I wonder if the CIA has ever run an analysis of what percentage of their resources are spent just chasing Jason Bourne. It must be at least 25 percent, based on what we see in the movies, now in their fourth go-round with this self-titled and completely redundant film.
(Five, if you count the Bourneless Jason Bourne movie starring Jeremy Renner, and nobody does.)
“Jason Bourne” isn’t so much a single story as a series of chase set pieces played out against international backdrops. Jason (Matt Damon, grayer and thicker since his last outing nearly a decade ago) appears in Berlin, the local CIA team is sent after him, he leads them on a merry chase on foot and by vehicle, he takes a few out with his super awesome spy skills, and gives the rest the dodge.
Now we’re in London. Jason appears, the local CIA team… you get the idea.
The plot, such as it is, involves Bourne again trying to ferret out the truth of his background as an assassin in the Treadstone Program. He’s already recovered most of his lost memory, but there are a few more tantalizing pieces floating out there. Like that his dad was involved in the creation of Treadstone, and the current CIA Director, the reptilian Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones), had something to do with his death.
There’s also another super-spy on the hunt who’s only referred to as “Asset,” played by Vincent Cassel. No, I mean literally, people call him on the phone or one of those spy ear piece thingees and say things like, “Asset, are you in London yet?” We know it’s going to come down to a faceoff between these two, since they’re setting up Asset as Jason’s supposed equal (ha!).
There’s an inordinate number of car chases in this Bourne outing, most notably a SWAT truck driven by Asset mowing through vehicles on the Las Vegas Strip, with Jason piloting some sleek black Product Placementmobile.
Alicia Vikander is the newbie, Heather Lee, a computer expert who acts as Dewey’s protégé but really sees him as a dinosaur. The Swedish actress speaks in a weird glottal voice that I think is supposed to be Generic American but comes across as Irish with the flu. Anyway, in her Bourne finds an unexpected sympathetic ear; she wants to bring him back into the CIA fold rather than just take him out.
It’s suggested that Bourne is truly tempted by this; but hasn’t he spent the last 15 years killing or crippling CIA agents chasing him? I can only imagine what the office Christmas party would be like. “And Mark’s Secret Santa was Jason, who’s given him… an artificial knee joint to replace the one he crushed in ’03. How nice!”
Turns out Dewey’s cooked up a plan for a new program, Iron Hand, which will allow the spooks to monitor everyone, everywhere. How scary! He’s even teamed up with a Facebook-like mogul, Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed), to do it without the public’s knowledge.
Of course, during the course of the film we witness the CIA cut off the power to a remote hackers’ den in Iceland, activate street cameras as spy cams in Berlin, and tap into a landline phone to use it to wipe a laptop computer sitting a dozen feet away. Why is it they need Iron Hand, again?
I also find it weird that Bourne never even makes a passing attempt at disguise. Oh, he’ll put on a hat or take one off, but that’s about it. He’s, like, the greatest spy ever, but he can’t even don a fake beard or something?
Paul Greengrass, who co-wrote the script with Christopher Rouse, directs another adrenaline-fueled expedition into the land of Shaky Cam and Hyper Edit. His action scenes have no weight or impact; watching this movie is like looking into a shattered mirror that somebody reassembled without much care as to what goes where.
The ugly truth is there’s just no juice left in the Bourne shtick. Damon seems dyspeptic and impatient; his Jason Bourne is no longer the wide-eyed youngster trying to recover his soul, just another immortal action hero mowing down bad guys. But without quips – he barely even talks, in fact.
Final edifying tidbit: In the last movie Jason’s birth year was given as 1971, but now in the documents we see flash on screen it’s updated to 1978. Clearly somebody is worried about Jason Bourne’s act getting old … with good reason.
