I have been too busy to see Venom, the Spider-Man villain film aimed specifically at bed-wetting adults, but none the less, I know that it is shit. I don’t have to watch two hours of Tom Hardy doing ‘acting’, adopting a voice like a castrated Welshman while covered in black CGI sludge to know that my time would be better spent mooing at the wall.
And yet there are some people out there who were genuinely looking forward to Venom. They went into the cinema thinking there was a chance it wasn’t going to be worse than some catastrophic nuclear meltdown that turns the people of a nearby fishing village into air-sucking mutants. But they were wrong. Venom is fucking awful. I assume. I have not seen it, as I said.
These Venom fans are not real human beings, and they do not matter to me. They are the sort of people who will complain about capitalism but then debate in detail the artistic merit and integrity of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 47.
They also persist to get excited about future Star Wars instalments, despite the fact that 60% of it is terrible. And that’s what this is all about, really: most films are generally a bit shit.
The other night I watched Spy, the Melissa McCarthy fronted comedy that The Daily Mirror described as “the funniest film of 2015”, but that can’t be right. In the same year, The Danish Girl, Carol and The Revenant were all released, and they were much funnier.
It’s outlandish poster quotes like this that are to blame for the ever-decreasing standards and expectations of mainstream cinema. They have created this sick reality where it’s actually possible for people to get excited about a film like Venom, which, as it happens, has received dreadful reviews. I told you I didn’t need to see it.