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,

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).

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.