A love-hate relationship is what I share with superhero movies, especially when every successive film from the genre is acclaimed as “the best film X studio has made”; this would mean we are living in the golden age of superhero films or that they set their bar pretty low and exceed expectations every time. This cycle tires me.
A love-love relationship is what I share with Tom Hardy, the first love is for the actor who in the 2018 spin-off “superhero” film plays an investigative video blogger named Eddie Brock. The second love is for the voice that comes from within when he is co-habited by an alien being: in this movie of course they call them symbiotes.
“What a lovely lovely voice!”
Tom Hardy is fascinating for me as an audience and economical for the producers because you not only get a good looking leading man but also a ‘Mel Blanc in the making’. This voice experiment has been one with mixed results.
For actors, everything in their body is an instrument of expression but very few exploit the voice (in the few are included luminaries such as Haasan and Oldman) while going into character.
Venom is nothing more than a generic superhero film in which an Elon Musk-esque villain (Riz Ahmed) comes up with the inference that in order for humans to survive, we must ‘mate’ with the aforementioned symbiotes from space. Aaand hero must stop him, only that hero has a little alien voice in his head.
Nobody can really say what an alien voice sounds like, I mean…
Cunning Linguist?
Ok at-least what comes out in this film is that; Tom Hardy could never really figure out what happens to him when he is infected by a parasite. So what follows is carefully strewn together footage of Tom Hardy walking around the block talking to himself (and that voice within his head), trying really hard to come to a conclusion on the character. The director has been sly enough to make this the main story and even relegate the usual superhero saving the day to a secondary feature.
Eddie Brock’s excruciating attempts is the only thing that makes the movie worthwhile and listening to him in the Venom voice say human anatomy riddled dialogues such as “Eyes!Lungs!Pancreas! So many snacks, so little time” is as much fun as the viewer comments the honest trailer voice actor gets with every video.
Maybe they should cast him in the sequel.
Venom: Innum Venum
The Lowly Laureate 