Venom

Biotech entrepreneur Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), the founder of the Life Foundation, fears that Earth will soon become uninhabitable and funds a space mission seeking a new world. The mission yields the discovery of several symbiotic lifeforms, which Drake believes will enable humans to adapt beyond Earth. Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy), a hardnosed, street-smart reporter with a controversial reputation, looks into Drake’s activities and in the course of discovering unethical human testing becomes bonded to one of the symbiotes. The symbiote, which calls itself Venom, grants Brock superhuman abilities at the expense of increased bloodlust, and the two must find a compromise to thwart a symbiote invasion of earth.

This movie was never really going to work. Venom began life not just as a Spider-Man character but as Spider-Man’s dark mirror. A Venom movie without the web-slinger (a necessity due to complex rights issues) is as fatally flawed a concept as a John Lennon biopic that makes no mention of The Beatles. Even absent that conceit, Venom is simply not very good. It has several bright spots (namely, Hardy’s relationship with the symbiote), but too much of it feels slapdash, merely adequate, a shadow of better (superhero and non-superhero) films.

Hardy is at once both an inspired choice and a poor fit for the title role. In the comics, Brock was fueled by Catholic guilt and resentment (Spider-Man ruined his journalistic reputation, which gave it a common grievance with the symbiote, whom the hero rejected) and had a weightlifter’s physique. Hardy’s take is missing all of those things, and his slurred American accent sounds off for the Bay Area setting. On the other hand, Hardy does convey Brock’s journalistic toughness and concern for the innocent. Moreover, Hardy also plays the symbiote (through voice modulation) as a voice in Brock’s head, and their banter isn’t spot on. When Venom isn’t chiding Eddie for being soft or encouraging him to eat people, it is playing matchmaker between Brock and his ex, Anne (Michelle Williams), or confessing its appreciation for its human host. This dynamic supplies both humor and pathos and is easily the best thing Venom has going for it.

Beyond that, the film got the character’s look (minus the giant white spider symbol, for obvious reasons) mostly right. A toothy, muscular mass of murderous tendrils, this depiction of Venom will erase all the bad impressions left by Topher Grace’s lackluster turn a decade prior. Here, you are getting a horror-movie monster in a quasi-heroic role, and the film never lets you forget the former part of that equation.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie ranges from adequate to subpar. Williams does what she can as Anne, a voice of skepticism and reason, but isn’t given much screen time to work with. Ruben Fleischer’s direction of action sequences is competent yet also recalls more innovative work in more memorable films: compare the motorcycle chase here with some of the chase scenes in Captain America films. On the lower end of the spectrum, the film’s antagonists are forgettable. Ahmed not-so-subtly evokes Elon Musk on villainy steroids: the affability is paper-thin, the concern for mankind misplaced, and the sociopathy cranked way up. Similarly, the rival symbiote Riot (Venom’s spawn in the comics) cheaply borrows both prominence and abilities from another much more memorable character (Carnage, also Venom’s spawn – the symbiote family tree is complicated to say the least) whose absence is keenly felt.

Were Venom launched in the years before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it would likely provide plenty of satisfaction. It’s visually engaging, fast-paced, and despite the derivations, true enough to the core of the character. However, given all the success Marvel has had in adapting its own characters for the big screen, this Sony offering simply can’t keep up.

Sleeping Beauties

A strange sleeping sickness called Aurora is causing the world’s women to stop waking up. Trapped in deep sleep, they form protective cocoons, and if disturbed, they respond with homicidal rage. In the town of Dooling, West Virginia, a mysterious woman named Eve Black might hold all the answers. Eve, who demonstrates precognition as well as the ability to remain awake, is currently locked up in the state women’s prison after murdering a pair of meth cooks. The prison’s psychiatrist, Clint Norcross, pledges to keep Eve alive and well in exchange for her help bringing the women back, but men outside the prison, who hold Eve responsible for Aurora, have other ideas.

Co-authored by Stephen King and his younger son Owen, Sleeping Beauties represents both the best and the worst of what the family has to author. On the one hand, it deploys many of Stephen’s trademark elements (page-turning tension, small-town intrigue, supernatural suspense) with a renewed sense of vigor. On the other hand, it also plays to the worst of Stephen’s excesses and by its latter chapters reads as a preachy, self-indulgent slog.

It is impossible to decipher which King is responsible for which of the book’s 700 pages, but one could read Sleeping Beauties as Owen giving his old man’s usual tricks a fresh coat of paint. From Castle Rock to Derry and beyond, Stephen’s work has often developed a keen sense of place, and in particular, has rendered small-town dynamics with convincing clarity. That much holds true here, but leaving Maine for Appalachia is a welcome change.

Similarly, Stephen’s solo work has featured no shortage of memorable characters, some admirable everymen and tenacious hard-luck women; others bigoted creeps and otherworldly abominations. All of the above can be found here, and while some characters (namely, Clint and the loathsome CO Don Peters) seem true to type, Owen’s contribution seems to be able to write the kinds of characters that Stephen can’t. The elder King has often stumbled writing characters of color, rendering them as Magical Negroes out of an admitted sense of white guilt. Sleeping Beauties breaks this trend in the form of Frank Geary, a black animal control officer who steps up in a time of crisis. Geary’s cunning, competence, and concern for his daughter are offset by a wicked temper and the kind of rules-enforcement sticklerism that would make an accountant blush. King Sr. has also struggled for the past decade to portray teens convincingly, not a surprise given that he is in his 70s. But here, Clint’s son Jared, the boys who antagonize him, and the girl he pines for are all rendered a bit more believably. Other colorful characters include Clint’s wife Lila (the town’s chief law enforcement officer), Van Lampley (an arm-wrestling champion correctional officer), Michaela (the prison warden’s coke-snorting TV news reporter daughter), and Angel Fitzroy (a more malevolent, less intelligent redneck Harley Quinn). Disappointingly, Eve Black remains a cipher for much of the story, her layers never really pulling back.

Speaking of disappointment, Sleeping Beauties features one of the more inept and heavy-handed treatments of theme in recent memory. The book’s very premise is an effective commentary on the way that society undervalues women, but that does not stop the Kings from resorting to filibustering about The Evils of Men for much of the novel’s latter third, a message hypocritically undercut by the number of murders committed by female characters.

Ultimately, Sleeping Beauties is an intriguing letdown, a book brimming with vitality and promise undone by the authors’ stubborn refusal to step off of the soapbox long enough for the story to speak for itself.