Venom was a mess. Not helped that the Marvel character has to be painted as an anti-hero of a sorts and not a villain.

Tom Hardy is Eddie Brock, a committed investigative reporter in San Francisco. He has a nice apartment, an ace lawyer girlfriend (Michelle Williams.)

Eddie loses it all when he has to interview an Elon Musk type businessman Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) whose spacecraft crashed. Eddie asks uncomfortable questions regarding his pharmaceutical business and gets fired.

Drake has found an organism from space. Drake is conducting unethical experiments with homeless people. The organism achieves symbiosis with Eddie when he breaks into the laboratory and this gives him extraordinary powers and a desire to eat human heads.

Eddie and Venom combine, but Eddie is slowly being killed by the symbiote and Venom wants to destroy the planet. Venom has a change of heart and then another more powerful symbiote is unleashed.

The film is slow to get going. Hardy looks miscast but gamely tries hard with what he has. Riz is saddled as a onenote villain. Williams is just the bland girlfriend.

The film fits uneasily in the Spiderman universe as it is presented as a darker film but totally it is all over the place. With so many script writers, I think this film shows all the signs of post production executive interference.