Venom: Let There Be Carnage — Review Thread

Venom: Let There Be Carnage(10/5/2021)
I must say I was confused when I heard that this second movie in the Venom franchise made ninety million dollars in its opening weekend. I could sort of get why people would be fooled into thinking that the first Venom was a “real” Marvel movie and make that a hit, but the fact that they showed up for a sequel suggests that they actually liked that movie and wanted more. Personally I didn’t completely hate that first movie but did find it to be a deeply inessential and forgettable effort and this sequel kind of made me wonder if I was even more generous to it than it deserved. Instantly as I started watching the new movie I was reminded of just how uninteresting Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock was as a character and how weird it is to be following this Spider-Man villain as a protagonist. There is more of an emphasis on the symbiont’s alien nature and the dark comedy of it constantly wanting to eat people, which could work, but I mostly just found the creature incredibly grading here and got very sick of hearing it say “Eddie” over and over again for much of the film. As the title implies, the film incorporates the villain Carnage to the proceedings here who is played by a scenery chewing Woody Harrelson doing a variation on his character from Natural Born Killers, which adds a little bit of life to the film but not a ton. There’s also a very strange subtext here about abusive relationships which seems incredibly tasteless. I will say that thing improve a bit in the second half when it leans more into just being a superhero movie. I normally find it disappointing when these movies just turn into CGI fight-fests, but here I found it to be more of a relief given how weak the human characters are. The way Venom and Carnage are rendered on-screen are generally one of the films’ strong points and I do like the way these inky toothy masses are done by the effects artists. Still, in this world where we have nothing but endless options for superhero movies we shouldn’t have to settle for something this half-assed, and I’m nothing but annoyed by the fact that this film’s post-credits sequence suggests that these are soon going to become even harder to ignore.
*1/2 out of Five