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,

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.

That lovable brains-and-chocolate-eating symbiote known as Venom was loose at the Javits Center this past weekend for New York Comic Con, in anticipation of the release of Sony's "Venom: The Last Dance" on Friday (Oct. 25).