These have been consistently messy, almost willfully bad movies, but Hardy’s performance has been a strangely compelling one-body buddy comedy. It’s one thing to throw a cape on and jump the sky. It’s another to run manically through the desert with an alien voice inside barking,

Things have not been going well for Sony Pictures and its Spider-Man Universe (SSU) lately. "Morbius" with Jared Leto received several Golden Raspberries, Hollywood's negative awards. "Madame Web" with a listless Dakota Johnson in the lead role received scathing reviews.

Tom Hardy, from the first "Venom" on, has chosen to offset the uncoolness of doing a comic-book franchise by putting his slumming in quotation marks, playing Eddie as a borderline doofus who talks like a grown-up version of one of the Bowery Boys.