SPOILERS DOWN THE PATH; THE DISCUSSION BELOW WILL NOT BE COMPREHENSIVE WITHOUT IT.
TREAD CAREFULLY. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.
Ever since Marvel established their cinematic universe, every other production giant is rushing to get their own one made. Till date, none of these half-hearted attempts escaped the aftermath of being a total disaster, which includes the DC Extended Universe and Universal Studio's Dark Universe. Venom being the first installment in a separate shared universe featuring characters from Spider-Man is the latest to join this hall of shame, for it's simply incredible to even brain how bad this movie is!
The keyword's in the starting paragraph - 'rushing'. Venom is one of those films that have no reasons to exist other than to make quick cash grab using an already famous IP. The plot seemed like it was made up along the way. It's dumb as hell, and events happen conveniently, lazily plus rapidly without any groundwork, motivation, dramatic purposes, set up, development or payoff. With emotionally hollow story proceedings and subtext-absent dialogues, Venom's a picture that's dead on arrival. It's an onscreen corpse basically.
Not only that, the computer graphics looked unfinished! Tonally, the movie's confused! It doesn't know what it wants to be. Lousy humor plus irrational character decisions were shocking. All of the portions taking place in Malaysia were horribly shot and told.
If nitpicked, we could find a few positives to say. Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) was a villain with motivation. At the very least, we could understand where he was coming from. Tom Hardy’s performance may be the only thing that's worth the ticket price. His relationship and interactions with the symbiote were entertaining to watch. Speaking of the symbiote, the design for Venom was cool though. The same can be said about Riot. Climactic battle and fusion was somewhat fascinating.