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. The performance has worked, in a certain way, because it kept the whole series light. But it has also ensured that the “Venom” movies are a lark and nothing more, geared to the arrested pleasure centers of fanboys: the more snark and CGI the better.
