Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is an investigative reporter with his own news show and a history of creating problems for himself. When asked to interview Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) the CEO of the Life Foundation as a puff piece he can’t help but dig a little deeper resulting in trouble for him and his fiancée Anne Weying (Michelle Williams). And then of course there is the small matter of an alien life form that has been discovered by Carlton’s space exploration programme.

Venom is a film that can only be described as schizophrenic. It’s tone and plot are all over the place and never even out. Billed as “in association with Marvel” it is worth remembering that Spider-Man and all of its characters are owned by Sony. As a result this is a standalone film, excluding the web slinger as well. And just to ensure that separation is complete the film is set in San Francisco. That means we have a Marvel character set in a world that the film makers can point in any direction and they have gone for a much darker world. A 15 certificate here in the UK means we get to see a much darker tone, although no actual gore.

Ultimately it’s a bad film. But there are glimpses of interesting choices and ideas. The tone veers erratically between comedy, action and dark science fiction. The comedy is occasionally successful both with Tom Hardy’s physical performance and his lines as Venom but it never feels like it meshes with the tone set elsewhere in the film. The action is straight out of the 90’s with an extended motorcycle chase and an awful CGI fight the only memorable scenes. And the dark science fiction really reminds me of The Fantastic Four reboot from 2015 (Venom even uses a “6 months later” title card similar to The Fantastic Four’s time jump). There are attempts to draw similarities between Venom and humans as parasites and Carlton’s motivations are initially for the good of humanity. But just like Fantastic Four, those ideas fall by the wayside when you need to have a CGI fight.

The other factor impacting on the tone are the performances of three normally fantastic actors who all seem to be doing wildly different things here. Hardy seems to be enjoying slapstick comedy, Ahmed (who gets the worse lines) is going for full on megalomanic and Williams seems unsure what to do with an underwritten girlfriend role.

Throw in a Stan Lee cameo, a mid credits sting setting up a sequel and an end of credits sting setting up another Sony film in the Spider World and you have a superhero film that wants to both fit in the mould and break it.

This is a film that aspires to be an interesting mess.