Tom Hardy Is Reason Enough

The first trailer for Venom did almost everything wrong—no actual Venom, just Tom Hardy looking hollow and intense in various locations—and somehow still convinced me I was going to see it. That’s his specific talent: you watch him operate and you want to know what happens next, regardless of whether the material has earned that interest.

Venom started as a Spider-Man villain in the comics—an alien symbiote that bonds with a human host and gives them a mouthful of enormous teeth and an appetite for heads. Over the decades the character migrated from pure antagonist to something more ambiguous, which is what allowed Sony to build a film around him rather than about a hero defeating him. Ruben Fleischer directed—the same Fleischer who made Zombieland, which suggested at least a working relationship with genre and tone. The rest of the cast: Michelle Williams, Riz Ahmed, Jenny Slate, and Woody Harrelson in a cameo so strange it has to be seen to be understood.

The film came out in October 2018 and was, by most accounts, a mess—a charismatic, intermittently entertaining mess, with Tom Hardy visibly giving two performances simultaneously and clearly having more fun than the film deserved, but a mess nonetheless. I saw it anyway. I knew going in. I went because Tom Hardy in almost anything is worth ninety minutes of my life, and that’s the kind of irrational loyalty that a certain kind of actor earns just by showing up and being completely, inexplicably committed to whatever ridiculous thing they’ve been handed.

There’s something mildly uncomfortable about that admission—being the kind of person who follows one actor into questionable films with genuine enthusiasm. I’m fine with it.