‘Venom: Let There Be Carnage’ Review: Doubling Down on Dumb
The most surprising thing about 2018’s Venom was how popular it ended up being given how bad it was. A mediocre rom-com disguised as a superhero movie, audiences fell in love with the bizarre chemistry Tom Hardy has with…well, himself as down on his luck reporter Eddie Brock and his alien pal Venom. The rest of the movie is a bland, forgettable mess but Tom’s extremely committed performance and the movie’s overall silly tone carried it to success.
With Venom: Let There Be Carnage, much has changed but the essentials remain the same. Ruben Fleischer is out as the director and Andy Serkis is in, largely owing to his proficiency with motion-capture technology which was used extensively to portray Venom and Carnage. Of the first film’s writing team, only Kelly Marcel was retained, now partnered with none other than Hardy himself, who was given a story credit. However even with these changes, Venom 2 is another loud, CGI-driven romantic comedy much in the same vein as the first, with Eddie and Venom’s relationship once again being tested by the world around them as well as their own intractable egos.
The story, contained to a mercifully tight 90 minutes, is pretty standard superhero stuff. Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is brought in to report on the life of serial killer Cletus Kassady (Woody Harrelson) and, through his and Venom’s own stupidity, end up setting the murderer free and giving him superpowers in the form of his own alien symbiote, Carnage. Kassady then retrieves his mutant girlfriend, Shriek (Naomie Harris), and the two embark on a surprisingly tame crime spree before Eddie and Venom are enlisted to put an end to the both of them. All the while, Eddie and Venom fight with each other, break up, reconcile, and also learn to deal with their mutual jealousy of former fiancee Anne’s (Michelle Williams) impending marriage to romantic rival Dan Lewis.
While the first movie paid lip service to social issues, the second has embraced its goofiness wholeheartedly, focusing almost entirely on the back and forth between the odd couple at the film’s center. There isn’t much in the way of action either, for most of the movie, as Eddie and Venom spend most of their time navigating various comedic situations while Kassady kills a few people here and there with his new superpowers before a blowout finale where all six characters in the entire story (major and minor) converge on the same location for a massive brawl. The story is strangely intimate in scale and scope, especially for the genre, keeping things refreshingly small throughout.
The characters are all thinly written, more stock types than anything, although Hardy’s once again fully committed performance in bringing to life the bafflingly daft Eddie and Venom shines. Harrelson, Williams, and Harris are all serviceable in their roles although their respective characters have little to offer. The script makes some attempt to portray Kassady as misunderstood, albeit in a very cliched way, but it generally falls flat since the rest of the time he is so over-the-top evil.
The action scenes are competent, with the finale having enough turns and shifts in momentum to keep things interesting. The CGI is…fine. It works for what the movie is trying to do, as Venom and Carnage look like cartoon characters, but that seems mostly intentional. As cartoons, however, both aliens are expressive and visually well constructed.
All in all, there’s really no reason to see Venom 2 unless you want more of the exact goofy formula that was in the first. It doesn’t really stand out from the pack beyond Tom Hardy being Tom Hardy and the filmmakers embracing a level of stupidity that’s almost charming. Almost.
