If one were hoping that Venom: Let There Be Carnage had any interest in improving upon 2018’s noisy and juvenile Venom, then one must be an incurably optimistic film critic. With 357 fancy pants members of the film intelligentsia weighing in, Venom’s Tomatometer score stands at a franchise-stalling 30%. But its Audience Score, based on more than 25,000 ratings, is a franchise-launching 81%. Add to that the film’s shocking $850M worldwide theatrical haul and it’s clear that the filmmakers’ task was not to creatively outperform the critic-proof original but to give sequel audiences more of the lamentable same.
Grading on that steep, steep curve, Venom: There Will Be Carnage is an unabashed triumph, which is to say, an unbearably cacophonous, logic-averse and slapped-together continuation of a movie series that’s crucial to Sony’s bandwagon attempt to use a Spider-Man-adjacent character to launch its own comic-based money-printing machine. If a film this misbegotten represents the house style for its awkwardly-named Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, God help us when Daniel Espinosa’s Morbius is released next year, followed by J.C. Chandor’s Kraven the Hunter in 2023.
Let There Be Carnage picks up a year or so after the original and wastes no time restating the first film’s primary concern, “what is Tom Hardy doing in these horrible movies?” These films are a waste of his enormous talent and while he’s the series’ biggest asset, part of me wishes he wasn’t in them. With his palooka-like build, pouty “aww shucks” facial expressions and goofball mumblings, Hardy continues to make crime reporter and symbiote host Eddie Brock cinema’s least credible investigative journalist. Worse, such a busy and oftentimes silly characterization requires Hardy to put aside what makes him such a commanding screen presence.
When the London-born actor really started getting noticed, around 2008’s Bronson, his early-Brando physicality, intensity and intelligence promised to fill the leading-man void created by the ascendency of today’s post-modern action heroes, those veritable walking winks to the camera. Here, in his biggest top-of-the-call-sheet role to date, Hardy’s main emotional gear is overheated comedic frustration which strips him of his greatest gifts as an actor. That said, seeing him work hard for a franchise payday is the film’s only pleasure. Seeing him work hard in the service of such garish-looking nonsense and wondering if it will be a strike against any possibility that he could become the next James Bond (fingers crossed) is a wellspring of disappointment.
Since last we were graced with their presence, Eddie and Venom have established an uneasy détente and frisson-filled rapport that pushes the material towards the realm of cracked buddy comedy. While sharing San Francisco digs, Eddie is given to complaining about Venom’s deficiencies as a roommate while Venom remains insistent that chocolate and chickens do not meet his nutritional needs and he requires human brains to “snack on.”
The story (co-written by Hardy) kicks into gear when Venom helps Eddie send incarcerated serial killer Cletus Kasady (played with appropriate scenery-chewing glee by Woody Harrelson) straight to death row. During a final jailhouse interview, an enraged Cletus bites Eddie’s hand giving the killer a taste of symbiote blood. The result is that Cletus becomes fused with Carnage, a meaner, redder and more tendril-filled version of Venom. The now-superpowered Cletus escapes prison and tracks down the lady-love he met years ago in reform school, a mutant codenamed Shriek (Naomie Harris, registering strongly in a thin role). After busting her out of a secret facility for mutants, the Cletus/Carnage combo go after Eddie.
One of the conspicuous failures of Kelly Marcel’s sequel script is how it skips over motivations and story beats like a rock across a pond (look for lots of deleted scenes on the Blu-ray) while treating Eddie and Venom’s unique relationship with the depth and humor of a sitcom. Had the film any guts, it would have bravely leaned into its “there for the taking” gay subtext. Instead we get a single timid and thoroughly unconvincing moment, when a frustrated Venom detaches from Eddie, stumbles into a rave party and declares himself “out of the Eddie Brock closet.” As a nod to the LGBTQ+ community, sadly a unicorn in superhero cinema, it’s an enormous missed opportunity and speaks to the film’s disappointing preference for going the bromance route. That, of course, could have worked fine, but Marcel’s dialogue which, optimally, would have been a symbiote fusing of Neil Simon’s evil twin and the (infinitely funnier) Deadpool movies, is never better than quippy and mostly traffics in the disconnect of a terrifying alien monster yelling profanity and name-dropping Barry Manilow. In brief, shining moments, Venom projects Eddie’s own fears of inadequacy and encourages him to reconnect with ex-girlfriend Anne (Michelle Williams, still slumming). Otherwise, we never get a clear bead on Venom, whose powers and ratio of “anti” to “hero” feel blurry and story-contingent.
The director corralling the ones and zeroes and occasionally the actors is Andy Serkis, best known for his groundbreaking mo-cap performances in The Lord of the Rings and Planet of the Apes trilogies. While he was presumably tapped for his ability to steer a cast through the complexities of digital performing, the fact is every superhero film is mostly a post-production affair, so what Venom: Let Their Be Carnage really needed was a confident storyteller who can deliver controlled chaos in the service of character-based comedy. Instead, Serkis hammers us with 97 exhausting, muddled, computer-generated minutes which is less a triumph of economical storytelling than a failure of imagination. The visual bludgeoning that passes for a climactic battle, set during Cletus and Shriek’s wedding, is essentially two CGI workstations fighting each other in a cathedral.
In the infinitely expanding universe of superhero cinema, there is room for a rude, crude, smaller-scaled outlier like, ostensibly, the Venom series. Not every spandex opus requires the epic grandeur, polish and machine-tooled wise-crackery of Marvel Studios’ films or the ponderous self-importance of the DC films. But the Venom movies have proven themselves to be minor league, first-draft versions of what these films would be at their most accomplished. Two films into this series, it’s obvious that its gloopy, shape-shifting, insult-comic of a symbiote isn’t the only one who needs brains.