Sony’s Venom, starring Tom Hardy as the part-time investigative journalist Eddie Brock and the part-time flesh-craving monster with a mind of its own released Oct. 5 and crushed the box office. The opening weekend is estimated to haul in $80 million at the box office.

The hype for Venom was through the roof. Announced in 2017, fans of the Spider-Man spinoff have been craving to see their favorite antihero in theaters ever since.

Eddie Brock is introduced on his investigative journalism show, where he exposes anyone who he finds participating in wrongdoing. After stealing evidence from his fiancée-at-the-time, Anne Weying (cast by Michelle Williams), he goes on to attempt to expose The Life Foundation and its CEO Carlton Drake, cast by Riz Ahmed, for testing lethal alien symbiotes on humans. Of course, that did not end very well, as Brock managed to lose his own job as well as get his then-fiancée fired.

After 6 months of scrounging around San Francisco looking for a job, Brock encounters a scientist of The Life Foundation, who persuades him to go to the facility with her, and see what is really going on behind closed doors. Not surprisingly, he ends up having to escape the facility with his newly acquired symbiote after he set all of the alarms off.

Drake goes on to discover that Brock is the man who stole the symbiote and sends mercenaries after him. It is when the mercenaries infiltrate Brock’s apartment where we finally are shown Venom, his glory bestowed an amazing work of CGI, capturing Venom beautifully as he wreaked havoc on the mercenaries.

He escapes once, but as he is climbing around the outskirts of the city, Venom is spotted yet again and comes out to play with more of Drake’s mercenaries. After he deals with those, Weying is coincidentally watching, just feet away from all of the action.

Weying insists Brock to visit her new doctor boyfriend, and seek help for his “parasite”. After being exposed to extremely high sound frequencies from an MRI, the symbiote separates from him, leaving Brock to his normal self.

For the third time, Drake’s mercenaries track down Brock, only this time they capture him due to his lack of a monstrous creature in his back pocket. As they are taking him to the site of the rocket crash that unleashed other symbiotes, Weying appears to be taken over by the symbiote as the She-Venom incapacitates each of the mercenaries, and transfers the symbiote over to Brock via a long-awaited makeup kiss.

After his powers return to him. Brock goes to deal with Drake, who is also coincidentally bonding with a symbiote, named Riot. All of this leads up to a fairly anticlimactic final battle between the two symbiotes and their hosts, reminiscent of the fight between the Hulk and the Abomination in The Incredible Hulk. Back and forth melee for a while, and then the fight ends with Drake and his symbiote burning as his rocket which he launches to seek more symbiotes explodes.

As the movie comes to a close, Brock tells his new best friend, Venom, that he can only turn into a violent, monstrous being in order to stop criminals, not good guys. Coincidentally, as he goes to buy Venom food to please his stomach, a criminal attempts to rob Mrs. Chen, the clerk. Needless to say, Venom prevented the robbery, as he and Brock bring the film to a close, telling the robber “We are Venom”.

Although his appearance was pleasing, the emotional effect of the movie overall was not so pleasing. It seems that each time there was supposed to be feelings of anger or sadness, the movie didn’t reflect the mood that it seemed to be alluding to. For example, when Brock’s fiancée dumped him in the middle of the road after he cost her her job, he simply just watched her leave–no retaliation, no emotion whatsoever.

Contrary to the lack of emotional appeals, Venom was filled with humor. The back-and-forth bickering between Hardy and the batman-esque voice of Venom in his head had the audience laughing throughout the movie.

Although Venom lacked in some aspects, it certainly did not deserve as much heat as it was given.