[wpdevart_youtube]u9Mv98Gr5pY[/wpdevart_youtube]VENOM ****

Dir: Reuben Fleischer (15, 123 mins)

The symbiote is back! After a lackluster outing as third banana baddie in Sam Raimi’s final overstuffed Spiderman film, Venom – a villainous antihero first glimpsed in a 1988 Spiderman comic – gets his own big-screen blockbuster. Will this violent face-eating alien get the Deadpool treatment and stay true to the character’s roots? Venom is no longer tied to Spiderman as part of his origin story: set in San Francisco, Tom Hardy plays Eddie Brock, a journalist who discovers dodgy goings-on at the Life Foundation run by Riz Ahmed’s shady Carlton Drake, who believes that mankind will only survive if it mutates with an alien parasite. Naturally Hardy ends up as an unwilling host for said parasite, transforming him into the sinewy, shapeshifting, teethy, long-tongued Venom. Strong support comes from Michelle Williams as Anne Weying, a district attorney with whom Brock is in a relationship. Ultimately, though, this is the Tom Hardy show, as he does a modern-day Jekyll and Hyde as Brock and Venom, for whom he has made another Bane-like voice choice. Director Reuben Fleischer is left to coordinate both the action sequences and the body horror, whilst steering another potential franchise in the making for an ever-expanding Marvel Universe. Opens Oct 3