Venom - Highly watchable 

Throw a half-brick up into the air and odds are that it will land on - yet another - superhero movie.  They're everywhere.  Granted they're pretty profitable and every studio wants a slice of Disney/Marvel's share of the market, so you can't blame Sony for 'rebooting' the popular anti-hero who was sort of featured in a Spiderman film which now feels like several hundred years ago.

Die-hard audiences weren't happy with how the titular character 'Venom' was portrayed before, but, due to various licensing deals between Sony and Disney, this outing won't feature Spiderman himself.  Therefore, few people had high hopes about whether this version would be much better than the previous effort.

I don't know much about the comic source material, but I'm suitably informed that this new film changes Venom's origins slightly.  A (typically mad) scientist intercepts a load of evil black space goo and decides to bring it back to Earth to eat us.  One such kindly portion of black computer-generated nastiness infects a San Francisco news reporter, Eddie Brock, and - sometimes - turns him into a giant monster with a desire to eat human body parts.  Nice, huh?

Now, for some reason, everything about 'Venom' shouldn't really work.  And yet it did.  Granted it's certainly no masterpiece, but it's great fun for all its - many - flaws.  For a start, as many pointed out, for a film which is based on an alien that likes to tear people apart, there's effectively no gore (it's PG-13 - a sign that possibly Sony are hoping to get Venom into Marvel's shared cinematic universe?).  This annoyed some, but, like I say, I don't know enough about the original to really let it bother me.

Marvel may be the bog kid on the block, but it's not beyond criticism, i.e. that almost every film without Loki is lacking a decent antagonist.  Well, even the worst MCU villain is better than the businessman/scientist who's supposed to be Venom's nemesis.  Yes, there's a post credit scene which is obviously designed to set up the next big villain and, from what I saw, he's going to be a damn sight more menacing that what we got here.  Then there's the special effects themselves.  They really aren't that good.  Okay, so they're what you'd expect from a film with a reasonable budget, but every time an 'alien' is on screen in its 'black goo' form, you can just tell it's been rendered and added on in post production.  Venom himself is slightly better and you can just about believe that he's on screen, but there are still times when the effects do let whatever 'realism' the film offers down.

Perhaps 'Venom's' main appeal is Tom Hardy.  He's an excellent actor in everything he does and he seems to be able to lift a potentially mediocre film to something that's actually good fun.  He's at his best when he's bantering with his 'alter-ego' as he can hear the alien creature in his head.  In fact, he has more chemistry with a disembodied voice than he does with the obligatory 'love interest' who I can't even remember her name.

I know that we're spoiled for choice when it comes to superhero movies, so, if you fancy one that isn't actually set in Marvel's 'shared universe' and is simple, fun and where you don't really have to think too hard about anything, then there's certainly worse about than 'Venom.'

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that