Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
So we never talked about the first Venom film at the time, because I hadn’t seen it, which seems as good a reason as any. We also didn’t talk about it some months later when I caught up with it, on my part at least because I was only half watching it, but even so it didn’t seem half as bad as my impression of the general consensus would have me believe. So, that was enough to tempt me into a cinema to watch this follow up, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, and also because the trailer promised a Tom Hardy / Woody Harrelson scenery chewing gurn-off. Sign me up!
This sees Hardy’s Eddie Brock having reached something a détente with his superpowered alien symbiote Venom, with absolutely no eating people. Even the bad people. But Venom’s straining at the leash, wanting to get out and see the world, meet people, eat some of them, while Eddie’s insisting on laying low, what with him being at least a person of interest to Stephen Graham’s Detective Patrick Mulligan for the chaos of the last film.
He’s trying, with little success, to restart his journalism career, but his luck changes when he’s called in to prison to interview a death row inmate, Harrelson’s Cletus Kasady, a very crazy serial killer who’s refusing to give up the locations of his victims. Much to Mulligan’s chagrin, Eddie / Venom crack the case to plaudits aplenty, but Kasady gets something unexpected out of it too, a bite and a taste of symbiote blood leading to the spawn of another symbiote, Carnage.
Just as Kasady is coming into his super-powers, the tension between Eddie and Venom finally boils over and they separate. Just the wrong timing, as Kasady breaks out of prison and sets about breaking out his also kinda crazy girlfriend, Naomie Harris’s Frances Barrison, or Shriek, due to her ability to create powerful sonic blasts with her voice. Will Eddie and Venom be able to get their act together and defeat Carnage and Shriek? Well, obviously. This is not something that’s looking to break any molds.
To be honest, it’s kind of refreshing in this day and age to watch a comic book adaptation that, well, seems like it wants to be a comic book adaptation and keeps any delusions of grandeur in check. It’s a big goofy film with a silly plot, silly characters and silly action setpieces and gets out of your way in about ninety minutes. It’s like a refugee from another time. The multiverse truly is imploding.
Director Gollum keeps things battering along at a fair old clip, the performances are, well, let’s politely say broad, but fitting for the material, the action sequences are adequate if hardly ground-breaking, and there’s a few decent lines in amongst the more serviceable parts of the script. I’m not going to bat for Venom: Let There Be Carnage being a masterwork of cinema, but it is an entertaining slice of hokum of the kind that I wish Marvel would embrace more closely. And maybe with the post-credit scene and the impending clustercuddle of Spider-man: No Way Home we’ll get that, but I am not holding my breath.