Venom by Pinkner & Rosenberg and Marcel

Venom is a absolutely not any kind of a great movie. But it is vastly better than the trailer for it suggests. Which isn't difficult, because the trailer for Venom must rank as one of the worst of all time...

Not least because it includes the last scene of the film, and the final punchline, with the effect that viewers who have seen the trailer, which will be most of them, finish watching the film on a flat and disappointing note. Nice work, guys.

The trailer also manages to make Tom Hardy look like an idiot, which is unfair since he's a fine actor and here manages to turn in an effective and sympathetic performance in a thankless role as Eddie Brock, a crusading journalist who becomes infected with an alien symbiote or parasite. 

The film is a tad confused about what a "symbiote" is (the word suggests a symbiotic relationship, which is decisively different from parasitism), but that's the least of its problems...

Venom is  fast moving and efficient thanks to director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland, Gangster Squad) and a strong cast, including Michelle Williams as Eddie's love interest Anne Weying, Riz Ahmed as the bad guy and Jenny Slate as a conflicted scientist working for the bad guy.

The bad guy being a super rich new-tech entrepreneur. A cliché which dates back at least to 2013's Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, where the heavy Chester V was a fun parody of Steve Jobs. Since then the fun has been wearing rather thin, though.

But Venom's real Achilles heel are the special effects used to create Venom and his fellow aliens — lashing tentacles, gleaming pseudopods, gaping maws full of razor sharp teeth... 

These are truly shameful, utterly inadequate and look seriously dated already. In a few years' time they will seem as antiquated and clunky as Donkey Kong game footage from 1981, though without the retro charm.

The script for this Marvel comic adaptation is basically an echo of Nigel Kneale's 1953 Quatermass Experiment – spacecraft returns to earth with alien entity which takes possession of a human. It's by the writing team of Jeff Pinkner & Scott Rosenberg, who worked on the excellent Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, with a rewrite by Kelly Marcel.

I actually met Kelly Marcel because I worked with her dad Terry on a TV show called Dark Knight (no, not that one). She's proving to be one of the most successful British writers in Hollywood, with credits including the adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey (yes, that one).

Venom's best feature is the bickering dialogue between Eddie and the monstrous Venom, whose voice he hears in his head — and which sounds to me like Tom Hardy doing a decent monster voice, with some processing on it.

This is not a movie for the ages but it's a businesslike and professional piece of work and, as I said, far better than the meretricious trailer would lead you to believe.

(Image credits: Plenty of posters at Imp Awards, thank you.)