A corporate-backed space flight crashes somewhere in Malaysia, spilling its priceless cargo: four canisters of stringy, thinking, creeping extraterrestrial slime. One such goopy critter manages to escape, inhabiting a series of human carriers like a serial carjacker, while the others are whisked back to company HQ for various pokes and prods in the lab. There, a forsaken ex-journalist with a grudge against the CEO (who is eeevil, for the record) makes off with one of the remaining creatures and everything quickly descends into metro mayhem and superpowered action.

The nuts and bolts of how Venom's symbiosis functions are interesting, and the running conversation inside his cranium is campy yet entertaining (think Willem Dafoe's competing personalities in 2002's Spider-Man), but the human characters are generic, the plot is full of gaps and the narrative is terribly predictable. We also don't get a lot of good reasons to cheer for the star, beyond the visceral thrills of watching him crush cars, eat heads and say precisely what's on his mind. He's a victim of his own bad decision-making, both as the human Eddie Brock (simultaneously killed his career and his love life in one selfish act) and his eight-foot, alien-skinned alter-ego (prone to violence, wrests control from several unwilling host bodies). They're better together, occasionally pushing each other to grow and learn, but that feels more like a throwaway scrap than a theme and the climactic struggle falls short of achieving redemption.

Tom Hardy turns in another satisfying performance as the twin leads, completely transforming his voice to inhabit the role of a bloodthirsty foreign consciousness, and the effects work is appropriately exciting. In all his glory, though, Venom looks rather bland without a big, white spider icon on his chest; his design is basically all head now. This isn't boring, it's just incredibly dumb.